My first pair of practice handpaws, made out of my "cheap" white fur. The toebeans are appliqued vinyl, the claws are resin. The cuffs have a bias tape edging and no lining, since early on in my online explorations I had read that linings were a luxury, good only for retaining sweat. However I found the resin claws made the tips of the fingers floppy and stuffing was helpful in stiffening them. And a liner is useful in separating the stuffing from the hands. Which  brings me to...

My second pair of practice handpaws. These do have a lining as well as the bias tape edging. The toebeans are felt "pillows" sewn into the white fabric, a method Kloofsuits describes in her tutorials above. This method needs less skill than applique to yield a very nice result, though it takes much more time and patience. (This is what podcasts are for!) Even though these were just practice handpaws I wish I had used fabric other than felt, as it pilled all to hell in about two seconds and looks awful. At this point I'm also feeling frustrated by the claws. They look crooked and haphazard in both sets of paws, pointing in whichever direction they feel like when I glue them in, no matter how careful I try to be.

And the a third set of paws, this time made of "good" fabric, with faux suede sewn-in "pillow" toe beans and the new resin claws. I'm pretty happy with how these look.

And, giving the handpaws a try!

Next, hitting the Interwebs for all the tailmaking tutorials I could find.  Kloofsuits' was one of my favorites (view here). Switch Cosplay's was another (view here). The biggest difference I found between these two was the their methods for making the belt loops, Kloofsuits' below left and Switch Cosplay's below right. (That's my very helpful hubby holding the tails up and mugging it up for the camera.) I ultimately decided on Switch Cosplay's method, as the loops were less visible when the tail was worn by itself on a belt. Kloofsuits' method is less fiddly and probably stronger, but I suspect it's meant for tails to be worn through a hole in a fullsuit, where the loops would not be visible anyway. 

I also did a lot of experimenting with the same pattern using different numbers of pieces, placements of seams, and direction of fur, the sketch above showing the different variations I tried. The one on the far left represents a tail made of two halves sewn together front and back. The advantage is obvious- super simple to make. The second one from the left is made of four pieces and has a seam going down either side as well. This helps give the tail a fuller, rounder look. The third pattern is made of eight pieces and is good for a tail with a black or white tip, and would also allow the fur to follow the tip's curve more closely. The last one is made of twelve pieces and can be used for a tail with a different colored underside, and allows the fur at the top to follow that curve more closely. I made all of these tails out of my solid, "cheap" white fur to be able to see any difference most clearly, and while I did like the way the fourth variation came out the best, I'm not sure I liked it that much better to justify the extra time it took. We will see. One thing I DID like about the fourth variation is that I could cut it out of my fabric with much less waste, since it was easier to fit the smaller pattern pieces on odds and ends I had on hand.

Here I am, experimenting on kids again. (They are expressing their sentiments on the matter, though that is harder to do with four fingered handpaws). Both these tails are made from the same pattern,  but the one on my long haired daughter is the two piece variation, and the other on her BFF is the four piece one, with a seam running down the sides as well as the front and back. The thing that struck me most about these tails however was the way they seemed to come out of the kids' back at right angles, which made them look more like horse tails than wolf tails. Back to the drawing board.

Above, tail pattern, take two.  While I like this one better I still think it comes out of the back at too sharp of an angle. As I often do, I printed out the photo and sketched ideas for changes on it, and used that for a reference for the third pattern.

 Above, showing tails I made from the three patterns I did side by side, the one on the right being one being the one I ultimately wound up using. You can see the different angles at which they come out of the  back. The one on the left is the four piece variation, the other two are the most complicated twelve piece one.

And TA DA!!! A finished tail, made out of "good" fur, intended to be part of a partial! This is the variation made with twelve pieces, with my third pattern above. Can't wait to start the head. Whee!!!!

 Check it out! Jawsets cast in two different colors! Aren't they bee-oootyful??

I decided to try a method I had thought about before but had dismissed as too difficult- making separate models of gums and teeth, making sure they fit well together beforehand, and then molding them. I knew that teeth and gum components carefully cut apart from a single a rubber jawset model and molded separately would make casts that would fit back together with no problem. However, as I wrote about in a previous blog post, the repeated  molding and casting in rubber that this method requires caused  bubbles to build up in the casts over time. Yuck!!

So I would use teeth I cut out of a resin cast to make that part of the mold. I would use a plasticine  "borrowed casting" of the gums (I talk more about this technique in this blog post), physically removing any bubbles before molding it. Bubbles can be removed from plasticine but not from rubber!  I would make sure the teeth and the gums fit very well together before making molds of either. The big challenge would be not squishing the models and ruining the fit during this process.

Above, the plasticine gum models in their Lego mold boxes, ready for rubber.

 

I said it before, and I'll say it again... aren't they bee-ootyful???!!!

Below, cutting the teeth away from the rubber jawset as neatly and carefully as possible, and then cutting holes through the entire thickness of the piece. Then, inserting it back into the original mold. The idea is to pour white resin into the mold for teeth, remove the blue part, and then pour pink resin for the gums.

Below, the final product. Not too bad. (Tangent alert- the stuff that looks like pink slime is in fact pink slime. When resin is overloaded with colorant it will not cure properly. I was using Smooth-Cast 65D here, a white resin, and I had to put in too much colorant in order to get a color other than very pale pink. The saints at the Smooth On tech support department recommended I switch to a transparent resin, Color Match 325, which I did.)

After I made a bunch more of these I decided this method may  not  be everything I hoped it would be. Sometimes pink resin would leak down over the white teeth and while I could carefully scrape it off before the resin set completely, this was something I'd rather not spend my time doing. Also, I would  get thin spots or bubbles between the teeth and the gums at times, which would make for weak castings (I could crush in these spots with my fingers) which was definitely something I did not want. Time to try another method. Onwards!

 Some sort of two part mold would seem to be the answer, one for the teeth and the other for the gums. My first thought was to cut the teeth out of a resin jawset with my Dremel, insert them back into the original mold, and make a model of just the gums from which to make a second mold. Below, getting ready to pour silicone for the model.

Below, pink resin gums cast from these new molds, with teeth inserted temporarily. Looks pretty good but....

Damn. The round thing in the middle is leftover resin that cured in the mixing cup. See how nice and smooth it is? See how full of bubbles the gums are? There's lots and lots of things that cause bubbles in castings but here it's due to replicative failure. Each time I demold rubber from rubber, microscopic layers peel away from the surface, creating these bubbles in the mold. (Even if I'm using plenty of release. Which can also cause bubbles, damn!!) Three times I poured rubber into rubber to make these, adding more bubbles with every step.

What to do next? Maybe at some point in the future I could investigate stronger rubber, but in the meantime, maybe I should go back to making molds from original sculpts whenever possible. 

Below, the gums airbrushed and the frisket removed.

Not too bad, except that the paint was still fairly fragile and the frisket would pull bits of it off around the gumline. I was not convinced this would be the go to method.

 Below, various airbrushing attempts, in various states of completion.A big fat pile of frustration.

Some of these are solid pink plastic, with the teeth airbrushed white; some of these are white plastic with the gums airbrushed pink. Ultimately, though, I was not happy with the durability of the airbrushed paint- even with the primer, and even sealed with a topcoat afterwards, it was too easy to scratch and damage. Maybe there is a method I hadn't discovered yet to make the paint more durable, but for the moment anyway I am SO DONE  airbrushing these things for sure. On to plan B, attempting to cast in two colors of plastic!

And, finished eyeballs, along with the reference picture I used. I did two sets like this, one for the grey wolf and another for the grey and black wolf I blogged about here.
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Another set of finished eyeballs, along with the reference picture I used. This will be for the brown and black guy I blogged about here.

​Now, I just need to get some teeth painted, so I can start building some heads!

​Planning colors is one of my favorite things to do. I get inspiration from colors of real animals, and ideas from going through my library of fur samples (I love adding to my library of fur samples!) I'm a happy camper when I find both a color idea I want to do and fur colors to do it with. This time around, I found not one, or two, but three ideas I want to do.
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Above, fur samples from I'm StuffedFur. The grey one is the poetically named  #2013. The long mixed buffy one is "Russian Bear", and the short one is "Super Seal Ivory". I'm imagining using  "Russian Bear" for the longer buffy fur on the neck and tail, and the SS Ivory for the shorter buffy fur for the handpaws and maybe the muzzle and jaw.
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Idea number two! I can use the mixed grey fur I want to use for the grey wolf to do this black and grey fellow as well. "Black Bear" from I'mStuffedFur should work nicely for the solid black parts. 

And, the first shipment of fur! Modelled by my daughter and her two friends. You look mahvelous dahlink!

To date I've purchased teeth from other craftspeople to use in my masks, but I've always really wanted to make my own. Below, a pile of attempts made over the past couple of years, made with Monster Clay (a kind of plasticine), Super Sculpey and Apoxie Sculpt.(Skully is supervising. He is a very helpful skull.) A whole lotta nope right here.

I finally settled on the Monster Clay for making the prototype teeth. I got tired of waiting for the other two to dry and/or set up in between sculpting sessions, and I got REALLY tired of trying to smooth out the hardened model with sandpaper or a Dremel. Monster Clay can be frozen to make it very hard and  can be softened with a hairdryer or microwave or such to make it very soft, so it is adaptable for a variety of sculpting situations. It also smooths beautifully using rubbing alcohol or its more powerful big brother, isopropyl myristate.

 

  

Above, looking to see how the lower part of the jawset is shaping up when viewed from the side. The teeth are just loosely stuck down to the gums at this point, so I can easily move them around if I need to.

 

And tada! Above, a finished Monster Clay plasticine model, ready for molding. Silly me, little did I realize that this would be the first of three finished jawsets I would mold. Sucks being a perfectionist.

Above, beginning the molding process, and a tongue while I'm at it. The jawset has been firmly attached to a thin piece of plywood, which will serve as a mold board. Every little gap between the model and the mold board is filled in, as otherwise the mold rubber could find its way under the model, and float the model up on top of it while it's curing. Which would not make a very good mold at all.

Above, getting ready to revise the jawset. Did I mention how I did this three times? Seriously though, it's easier to check the fit of the teeth in the head when they're in hard resin and not squishable clay. Above, a set of resin teeth that has been Dremelled down to fit the head better, and another set of clay teeth made by pouring melted Monster Clay into the mold, called a "borrowed casting". It's much easier to tweak the teeth from a borrowed casting than trying to make a whole new set from scratch. (If I wasn't such a chicken, I could have also resculpted my original set of clay teeth. But I wanted to keep them the way they were for extra insurance.) 

Above, revisions. To the right in both pictures is the original sculpt, still on the moldboard. In the middle is a modified resin casting, and to the left is the resculpted "borrowed casting". This first go round I removed the "flare" thingy from the bottom jaw, as it only really served to complicate fitting it into the resin head. I also made the plate for the upper jaw more symmetrical. You can see how the original sculpt has a bigger "bulge" on the left hand side than the right. Why did I do this, you may ask. Well, I was using a reject resin head casting to fit the teeth in, and I forgot that the resin on one side of the muzzle was much thicker than that on the other so.... in order to center the teeth in the opening, the plate had to be a lot wider on one side. Definitely not going to be the case with the average resin head! Fortunately I realized this before I got too much further into this process!  A great big duh, but could have been a much bigger duh.

Above, showing all three sets of revised teeth. The top set is the first one, the middle is the second and the set on the bottom is the final version. Besides changing the "plate" as described earlier, I did a lot of playing with the front incisors. I refined them in the second set but then realized I had also made the top ones too small, so I made them bigger in the third set. After re-checking my reference pictures of real wolves I also decided the gum area above the front incisors also needed to be longer, so I also changed that in the third set. I also did a lot of fiddling with the area circled in yellow in the right hand picture, with the way those particular teeth came together. The top incisor right next to the large bottom canine also underwent a fair bit of refinement.

And since I had spent so much time fiddling with the teeth, I decided to fiddle with the mold making method as well. At the suggestion of an acquaintance I made my next set of mold boxes out of Legos instead of Tupperware containers, so I could get the mold boxes precisely the size I needed them and save molding rubber. Molding rubber is expensive. They don't call it "platinum cure silicone" for nothing. (A good source of cheap used Legos is bricklink.com.)

 

Above, the nose and tongue models with their squishy rubber counterparts. Wheee!!!

Checking out the fit of the rubber nose in a resin head. Lookin' good! The resin head on the right wants a rubber nose too. 

And above, a pile o' puppy parts, ready for maskmaking!! I'm feeling good about the results of my endeavors here. Time to think about colors for fur!!

I'm starting to get over my terror of airbrushing and look forward to it instead. It helps to keep in mind that if I find a new way to plug the airbrush up, and subsequently find a new way unplug it, I've learned something new and made progress. This particular go round I found that what I thought was one piece of the airbrush was actually two pieces. Paint can dry in there and plug things up. The two pieces unscrew from each other, and I can get in there with a dental pick. All is good.
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Above, Maxine before any airbrushing, modelled by Uncle Nathan and visiting with his two dogs. The dogs don't know what to think.

I was very happy I kept detailed notes on which paints I mixed to get the colors for Max, as it made coming up with those same colors for Maxine that much easier. Yay for notes!
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