I 'broke the mould' making this one... Lol jokes the mould is fine.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING LOOKING AT MY BLOG?!?

Nah its fine don't worry

Anyways when we left off I was babblin' on about armatures. so next, I thought I'd show you my miniature girl.

As I said before, there's a couple scenes that show a hill with a little girl on top. So to save me making another full armature with clothes and all that, I decided to make this hill scene in miniatures.  

So here I go:

Firstly I sculpted a design of the little girl on top of the miniature armatures made previously

She's shown below:

She's only being seen from the back 3/4s so the sculpt of her face wasn't too important, for this, i just need a readable silhouette of a girl, I think It works...

Next the claying up.

I rolled out a sheet of plaster scene with a rolling pin...

I then cut out her basic shape in the plasticene and plonked her in.

Carefully, I clayed her up so she was half submerged in the plasticise. This would give me the one part of the mould.

I added moulding keys also :)

I then boxed her in ready to pour plaster on her...

I then got prepped for making plaster. with a checklist of things I needed:

• Clayed up and boxed in sculpt 

• Cup of water  

•  Cup of plaster (in this case, a Marmite lunchbox) 

•  A whisk 

•  A mat, to stop mess! 

•  Extra plasticene in case of leakages 

•  Bravery 

•  Courage 

•  Patience

I then made the plaster, poured it and then waited for it to set.

I unboxed the mould and removed the clay to find One part of my mould!

WOO!

I cleaned things up and then added more shapes around the sculpt so I could remove the two parts of the mould easily when using sticky silicone

I then boxed her in again, placed the K&S where I needed a hole for the swing and then poured some more plaster on top

And here are the two parts of my mould! waahooo!

I then filled the mould up with black silcone (as she'll be as a silhouette)

However, the final didn't come out as planned, and I've run out of silicone now, so I'll upload a pic when I've made a version i'm 'happy' with.

Over and out

Oooh! Where've you been?

HA! Where have I been?

Makin' stuff thats where!

Sorry for the lack of any posts my sixteen followers :( I get so into working, I forget I have to show it on the interweb now and again, so now it is my mission to tell you what's been happening!

Well, when we left off I was saying stuff about Green Screen Mirrors and Maquettes and stuff, so next, I went on to the armatures for my puppets :)

First off, I designed the Boy's armature...

Once this was all Digitally created, I got some K&S brass tubing and marked out what I needed for my armature!

Then I cut all this out, shown below...

To get a nice finish on the K&S I file the insides and outsides with a small file, This also helps with the longevity of the armature as filing away any rough edges will prevent the wire running through it wearing down or snapping.

This project I also used some wet and dry sandpaper to get that extra nice finish, It made the insides much smoother and hopefully it will help give me a couple more seconds of animating time.

Let the filing commence!

LOOK HOW HAPPY I AM

My character wears socks on his feet, and he has a little bobble on the end of his toe, so to make this animatable, I ran a some thin wire out of the 'toe' and sculpted a little miliput bobble on the tip.

I'll sculpt around this in clay next, to eventually make a silicone mould, which will be covered in the sock fabric (hopefully!) 

Close up of the hand armature, Here I cut out a strip of aluminium sheet with some metal scissors, and drilled a small hole in the wrist, I then ran some wire into this hole and hand twisted it to make the wrist bendable, using some more thin wire, I made some fingers and stuck it all together using epoxy glue.

These are the smallest hands I've ever made, so its a bit worrying when I coming to sculpting, but it'll be ok! 

TAH DAHHH!

finished armature with no padding or steel for the feet!

Now, I have a couple of scenes in my film with a hill outside in a window. here we see a little girl playing on a swing.
Now, to save on the work load, I've planned to make this girl at half the size of the full animating size.
so Here's her armature plan...

However, at this time, I had not really thought about how I would tackle this, all I knew is that she'd need a bit of K&S to attach her to her swing.

It took a couple of attempts, and I tried a whole bunch of different ways of making the armature, from using washers, solid miliput these hand armature things I found in the stop mo room. aluminium sheet just stuck to some wire...

But in the end I came up with my own solution...

My solution, was to get some tiny little pieces of K&S, and then drill these little tiny holes into the top with a dremel. 

Shown below...

I then twisted some thin wire to the size of my armature plan,  and inserted into the holes I drilled perviously, 

I then glued everything in position and then I was done!

My boy character is also being seen on the hill, so I have to make him at half size too!
So for the armature plan, I simply shrunk down the original full sized plan seen at the top of this post, and then edited it, so it fitted the purpose.

I did the same as I did with the girl armature for the boy, so I won't bore you anymore.

But anyways! thats some armature work done.

It took way longer than expected... so now on to everything else I have to do!