Bend, Shape, Wrap
Cracking on with new work. My duo is about ready to…have things done to it. Have sort of decided on a colour scheme and half worked out how it will look. Yep, nice and vague. Rarely have a firm plan for this part. It's more a case of trying the bit I think I want and seeing whether it actually looks like I planned (often it does not - then have to fix the horrible result and get real). Anyhow, sticking with using handmade paper for now as the two figures are a close fit and using thicker fabric will make it hard to dress them and put them back together after.
Not content with doing one piece, I've started two more to fill in the waiting-to-dry time. Another skinny one, and though you can't tell from the rubbish photo, I've come up with a solution for doing hands. I had some lengths of electrical tubing stuff which slots over the arm wire, then cut 5 pieces of very thin wire for fingers etc. and twined the ends around to go in the other end of the tubing. The fingers are then dipped in Paverpol and dried (repeat x 2 to get a bit of a coating over the wire), then use Paverpol again with cotton wool which is teased over and around the fingers and over the palm. The cotton wool is very fine but once I got the hang of how it handled I could drag it to where I want and smooth it out. Final hand shaping is done with paper pulp and even when that’s all done, there is still enough flexibility to place fingers and wrists where I need them. It’s worked really nicely with the girl and it’s not crazy-mad finicky or stupidly time consuming either. Yay, so glad I’ve got that sorted cos I hate looking at handless arms for days on end until I really have to do them!
Now the other, I may live to regret starting. I plan to do it in paper pulp so that means more human shaped…it’s an acro gymnastics pair, firmly connected with an extra stiff wire length through each of their arms but I’ll have to fiddle with the guy’s leg position to get him to stop falling sideways. I just got him to stay still long enough to take the picture then….TIMBEERRR! Ok, that’s fixable, no problem really. That lot should keep me out of trouble for a week or so.
