But first, a flashback to our previous post! ​Here is a photo of previous guest's Sadie Rae's paw. Very basic observation here- the foot,  viewed from the side, is largely oval in shape. Both of the top and the bottom of the paw have a curve to them. This is not a difficult concept, not in theory anyway. Shouldn't be too difficult to sculpt, right? (Cues theme from "Jaws"....)

​Meet Sadie Rae Shortpants, a German Shorthair Pointer owned by my brother Nathan. She recently crossed the Rainbow Bridge at the grand old age of fifteen. 

One of her favorite pastimes was coralling as many of her human packmates as she could with her leash.

​She was not a lap dog, though sometimes she thought she was.

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​Sadie was also my model for my potential canine handpaw pattern. She would very much prefer that I Leave Her Feet Alone, but she did cooperate enough for me to learn a lot and make a few clay sketches. What a good puppy!! 

Fun things I’ve learned from Sadie about dog feet (other than that they smell like Fritos): the claws do not come out of the center of the toes, they come out of the side closest to the center of the foot. The first and fourth toe are not the same size, but the first toe (the one closest to the dew claw) is bigger and longer, like a pointer finger, and the forth toe is smaller, like a pinky finger. 



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​Looking over my photos on my Facebook page I realized I had wanted to do a post about making lips for my masks but forgot! So here goes!

The snaky looking thing in the long moldbox on the right hand side of this pic is my first attempt at a lip for my resin wolf head. I sculpted it pretty straight because that's how I had seen other lips sculpted  online. Silly me.

(Please pardon the friendly local neighborhood middle aged geeks....)

There are a few basics to balancing and strapping a mask I have known since that very first maskmaking workshop I took at the dawn of time. The mask should rest on a wearer’s “third eye”, in the center of the forehead a little above the eyebrows. The strap should go from just above the tops of the ears to under the base of the skull/along the top of the neck. If you stop to think about it, you’ll notice that drawing a line around these points does not make a continuous circle, like a crown, but a bent shape with a shallow angle over the tops of the ears, as if someone had taken that crown and stepped on it.  

You can’t really get this bent-crown shape with simple mask straps, but it doesn’t matter much if the mask is lightweight and well balanced, as would be your standard paper mache Mardi Gras mask. But if the mask starts to get larger and more unbalanced, say, from a toothy long snout sticking out in front, it becomes both more important and harder to do. A simple strap that goes under the base of the skull will want to pull the mask down on the forehead, a strap that supports the mask directly behind the forehead will be too high on the head and want to come flying off.

 ​​After spending weeks trying to solve this problem, it dawned on me that someone years before me had probably already figured it out. I brainstormed lists of all the big awkward headgear I could think of, which ultimately led me to, the construction helmet. And lo and behold, construction helmet suspensions had that bent-crown shape I needed and were cheap and easily available on Amazon! And as a big added bonus, they are adjustable to fit just about any sized head. Now just to figure out how to install one.

(The black hoods in these pictures were an early idea  for installation. They didn't work. Well, except maybe to make us look even more geeky.) 

 One thing I learned, after much trial and error, is that the suspension needs to “float” inside the head. The suspension clips (those things that look like points on a crown) slide into slots in the construction helmet, leaving all the straps free to move and adjust to the size and shape of a wearer’s head. Attaching these straps permanently inside the mask distort them and keep them from moving as they should. I had to think of the equivalent of a clip slot in the head, and ultimately came up with the following.   

​Here are some quick outdoor photos of Silas. It's difficult to see much detail in the partial as the lighting isn't quite right. I could fiddle with my camera settings to try to get a better exposure, but my faithful model and husband has breathing difficulties, and so can only wear the mask for maybe five minutes tops. Not much time for fiddling. 

​My husband and I could theoretically switch roles, with me modelling and him taking pictures, but unfortunately photography is not my husband's strong suit. I'm modelling here while my daughter is taking pictures. She's a good photographer but has limited patience for these endeavors. Still, most importantly, you can see that the exposure is still not great and not a lot of detail is visible in the mask.

The beginnings of an indoor setup! My husband, a teacher, had just made a video with his kids at school and so was all excited about the idea of a green screen, so that's what we got for a backdrop. I learned shortly afterwards that any color solid backdrop would have worked, and a non green backdrop would have worked better, as the green threw up a lot of green reflections on the partial which had to be edited out later. But that's what GIMP is for. My floodlights from my tabletop setup worked just fine, though it was a pain to carry them up from the basement to the living room, which had taller ceilings.   

And....a downside of indoor setups like this one... cats love 'em. This older cat was relatively well behaved but our younger cat had to be locked out of the room, as she wanted to play with the backdrop REAL BAD and nearly pulled all the stands into every last item in the living room, including my beloved model horse collection.

​(Photobomb..... )

​If I were going to go through all the trouble of learning how to remove figures from their backgrounds, I wanted some cool backdrops to stick them on after! I took this picture on Pearl Street in my hometown of Barre, VT, a new pedestrian walkway featuring a granite sculpture of a castle. (Barre was given a large bequest by a wealthy resident, which was used among other things to commission a number of granite statues commemorating Barre's long history of quarrying and stoneworking.) It only seemed fitting to incorporate images of other local artists' handiwork along with my own.  

​Background photo number two, also of the granite castle sculpture on Pearl Street in Barre....

​I followed the instructions for building a simple spray booth I found in this article in Fine Woodworking magazine. (Link to the article can be found here.) The two illustrations to the left sum up the most relevant info nicely. In summary, the booth is made out of rigid foam insulation and the sides and back are fastened together with duct tape, so it is lightweight, foldable, and easy to transport. The back panel has a hole cut in the center into which a furnace filter is placed. A box fan is set behind the hole for drawing air through the filter. 








The booth is placed in a way to take the best advantage of the room's air circulation, with sources of fresh air in front of it and a means of venting painty air behind it. Since there is no actual ductwork to contain the fumes, the booth does not exhaust them completely, but I can attest that it does cut down considerably the painty mist that otherwise hangs over my work area.  

It's important to note that this booth is only for water based paints such as acrylics. It is definitely not suitable for solvent based paints, that's a whole nuther animal entirely!  

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​And now, time for my own booth. ​​Before I did anything else, I made a mockup out of scrap cardboard, to be sure that I would like the dimensions and find it comfortable to work in. I actually wound up doing a fair bit of painting in this mock-up. 

Right, my own booth in progress. ​I used one 4' x 8' sheet of 1/2" thick insulation that I purchased at the local lumberyard. I chose a white color so that as much light as possible would be reflected back onto my work. Since the fiberglass inside the panel was very irritating to my hands, I also put duct tape over all the cut edges to contain it. It's white, so it's hard to see here.  

​Left, making sure the furnace filter is installed correctly! The arrow has to match the direction of the airflow when the filter is installed.

The filter is a basic, inexpensive one. According to the Fine Woodworking article, a higher grade of filter, one that could screen out microbes, dander, and such, would get filled with paint and plug up too quickly. Here you can also see the duct tape I applied around all the cut edges to contain irritating fiberglass.

​ I also added bulb weatherstripping around the outside of the filter, under the theory it would make the booth more airtight. I'm not sure it was worth the effort. In trying to get the weatherstripping into the gaps I sometimes had to make the gaps larger, so I may have been working counter to my purpose.
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​So I've made two heads, and now I want to learn to make tails and paws to go with them!! Whee!!! My last blog post covered my tail making adventures, now it's time to move on to paws. Here, my daughter and her BFF model the first two sets I made.

 

​While in theory it should not have been too difficult to make a pattern for a tail, I wound up going through three versions before I came up with one I liked. So I was delighted to find Freakhound's free and extremely cool paw patterns online. As it was, I was going to have to learn a ton of new skilz in order to make handpaws, so it was really nice to have that one less thing to worry about.  Click here if you want to check the patterns out.

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 Some of the things I learned included using bias tape to edge the cuff (Matrices' tutorial here) and appliquing toebeans (Matrices' tutorial here) (and Kloofsuits' here). While Freakhound's pattern includes pretty complete instructions, I also got a lot of good information on general construction from Kloofsuits's two handpaw tutorials (part one) and (part two). These include instructions for doing the toebeans as little "pillows" sewn into the hand instead of applique, and a very good demonstration on making liners.

One thing I haven't found anywhere, however, is clear instructions on adding resin claws. All the instructions I have found are for sewn, fabric claws. So I'll have to figure that out for myself. Supposedly it's just cutting a hole in the fingertips and gluing them in, right? 

So down into the basement I go to sculpt, mold and cast new claws. I based these on the claws in Freakhound's pattern hoping they would better harmonize with the overall handpaw design. I made the originals out of Apoxie Sculpt and polished them to a high shine using the Novus plastic polish system.  I made two modifications to the bases of the claws in the hope that they'd more likely to wind up straight in the fingertips: I made them oval, not round, so I could tell which were the tops and undersides of the claws from the inside of the paw, and I  drilled holes in them for stitching the claws in to the paws to keep them steady while gluing.

​These paws also have a different kind of cuff than the bias tape edging that Matrices demonstrates. I was OK with less than perfection with the two practice sets of handpaws, but since I'm hoping to sell them I wanted these black handpaws to be perfect. The bias tape edging defied me four times on these paws, and four times I ripped it off. I wound up buying Kloofsuit's deluxe handpaw pattern just for the instructions on this kind of cuff, and I'm very happy I did. The download is available to purchase here.