Feat of Foam, Part II

I think....

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...that I...

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...might have just finished this paw. And I'm very pleased with myself. 

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And if not, well.... In case you didn't know, that's the canine equivalent of your index, you know, middle finger!!!













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OK, backing up a little bit and telling the tale from the beginning.

It all started with these pictures, my favorite reference pics out of stacks and stacks of pics for dog feet. The pic of the tan dog foot is especially useful as it's relatively easy to see the bony structure underneath the skin.

Using my handy dandy Artograph projector, I enlarged tracings of these two pictures, one for the bottom of the paw and one for the top, to the size I wanted my finished handpaw to be. These would be my "master patterns" and I would use them to trace out smaller parts of the pattern....

....like so Here are patterns for individual toes and pads, traced from the "master patterns" using the light table and cut out.

I had actually started using these patterns before I started the clay feet I blogged about earlier, but I then I hit a snag and at the time couldn't figure out how to get around it.  

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​Previously, I had also made a master pattern for the side of the foot.

​I used this side pattern to carve out toes.  I used the bottom pattern to make the bottom of the foot, with the pads and toebeans glued  in the appropriate places.  I used the top pattern to make a piece just from the wrist to the knuckles and invented a piece to fill in the sides. I glued it all together and... 

Yuck. This looks more like a hoof than a paw. There's the question, what to do with the space between the fingers? How to make this work as a glove? The fingers here are all separate pieces but they're all attached to a one piece underside. How would the fingers move?  (I could figure this out now, but this doesn't change the fact this paw is just plain old ugly.)

(Awww, poor unwanted ugly paw, Trixie will give it some love.)

That's when I switched over to making and taking patterns from the clay feet, coming up with this "tubular" style of toes in the process. Here we have our friend the foam foot from my previous post, made from the enlarged and refined clay foot pattern, along with a selection of unattached toes and toebeans, showing off their tubular style. 

But then, as it so often happens, just as I was ready to tweak the sizing a little bit and then call it done, I got very excited about how cool the palmar pad for this foot looked, carefully carved and patterned the way it was. Then I got the itch to do the fingers that way too. I could carve knuckles! And tendons! How cool would that be??

Here's a refresher ​I​n case you're wondering what a palmar pad is, it's that large pad on the underside of a dog's front paw. Here is my carved foam palmar pad (the thing that looks a little like a yellow fried egg) the pattern I made from it, and a test version sewn from the pattern. It's beautiful, trust me.

 Here, the foam foot with the original tubular toes torn off and replaced with carved toes. The potential  is clear, but at least for me, carving each toe out of a single piece of foam made it easy for proportions and proper placement of various parts to get out of whack.

​I decided to try out a combination of carving, using the "tubular toes", and tracing and cutting out parts from my original patterns, thus coming up with this most recent foam foot. Here's a little demonstration of my method, making a random toe.

 First, using the patterns pictured at the beginning of this post and a sheet of 1/2" thick foam, I traced and cut out out two finger pieces and one knuckle piece and glued them into a stack. I inserted a claw shaped piece of cosplay foam in the end of the finger to mark the placement of the nail. I then used a pattern piece from my previous foam foot attempt and glued it underneath my finger/knuckle stack for the "tube", leaving an opening for the toebean. I then started to give the whole thing a little shape with scissors and an Exacto knife.  

Next, toebeans. Using my patterns again, I traced and cut out toebeans from the cosplay foam and some  1" thick sheet foam. I glued the cosplay foam into the end of the "tube", being careful to check my reference pics to get it aligned correctly and  at the proper angle inside the toe. (Be sure to line up the tip of the toebean wth the claw!) I then  glued the 1" foam toeabean in, using the cosplay foam toebean as a base.  Using a Sharpie, I sketched out the side of the toebean on the 1" foam and gave it some shape with my scissors and Exacto knife.   

Now, to  give the top of the toe a little bit more of a curve. Again I used my patterns to trace out just the half of the knuckle nearest the claw, and just the part of the finger underneath the knuckle. I tapered both pieces with the Exacto knife so they would be thickest around the knuckle and thinnest towards either end of the finger, and glued them into the appropriate spots on the "stack". Then I shaped them a little with my scissors and Exacto knife. 

​Using the patterns like this takes a lot of the guesswork out of the placement of the different parts, such as knuckles and toebeans.

The outline of the knuckle was getting a little  lost with all the layering and trimming, so I made the outline clearer by curving a thin piece of foam around it, gluing the foam down, and trimming the top a little to blend it in.   

Now to give the underside of the toe a little bit more of a curve. (I'm sorry but that first picture looks really rude!) With a Sharpie, I marked where I wanted the curve to be, cut a slit along that line, pulled one edge of the slit under the other and glued it down.  A curve, tada!

And here, our finished demonstration toe. I continued to refine the toes on the handpaw adding little pieces of foam and carving them down to get them just right, but this toe does get the basic process across. 

Now to start taping this foam foot and making the pattern for a fabric foot! So excited!