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Posts Tagged ‘Color’

Adding “flesh” to the steampunk deer head

05 Apr

Now that provisions for the antlers are in place, I can start to “flesh out” the deer head. I began by filling the void areas in the wooden armature with wads of newspaper, then going over that with rolled newspaper, which I fl;attened out a bit and trimmed to fit. I taped those pieces in place with masking tape and kept building on that until the desired shape was reached, reffering often to several different photos I’d printed from the net.

Adding "flesh" to the deer head

Adding “flesh” to the deer head

More layering….

A more smoothed out look

A more smoothed out look

Once I had the basic shape I wanted, I decided to spray the “copper” antler so I didn’t have to be careful with where the paint went. I knew I’d be covering the newspaper later.

Copper sprayed antler

Copper sprayed antler

The “real” antler will wait until I start adding the actual mâché to the deer head. But for next time, I’ll add detail to the face and that will include providing a base for the eyes, both “real” and cyborg…

Don’t miss it!

 

 

 
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Posted in Papier-mâché, Recycled and Re-purposed, Repurposed and Upcycled, Sculpture, Steampunk

 

The gondola

24 Feb

I’ve made quite a few gondolas that were the typical boat style, but I wanted to do something different for this steampunk diarama. I thought that making something that looked like a tube or bubble would be cool, so I started rummaging through my boxes of pieces and parts to find an object that would be suitable to repurpose. What I came up with was two plastic scoops that came out of a powdered drink mix or something, (I collect anything that’s interesting!). Shown here, I’ve already painted the handles and attached a plastic piece with a spiral as a “bowsprit”.

Plastic scoops as gondola

Plastic scoops as gondola

Here’s a close up of the bowsprit and the front of the gondola.

Bowsprit closeup

Bowsprit closeup

I glued the two scoops to a plastic disc for some visual interest, then added a flat plastic piece in between the handles, (not pictured), then I created a rudder fin to go on the stern of the gondola. I used the same technique as I did for the stabilizer fins.

Rudder fin

Rudder fin

The final gondola was then given an antiquing of patina color where appropriate (brass and copper areas), and attached to the airship body. This attachment required a careful snipping of the paper airship skin so the handles of the scoops could be inserted and glued.

Finished gondola

Finished gondola

Here’s a closeup of the attachment.

Closeup of gondola

Closeup of gondola

Next post, I’ll show how I prepared the “box” part of the diarama. That is certainly an example of recycle, reuse and repurpose! Thank you for your continued interest in my work…

How would you have built the gondola?

 

 

 

 
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Posted in Recycled and Re-purposed, Sculpture, Steampunk

 

Adding the stabilizer fins

07 Feb

In building the stabilizer fins for the steampunk diarama airship, I first had to choose a shape. On other ships, I’ve made them rounded, but I like the feeling of a scalloped fin. I’ve also made different scalloped fins before, with some being a solid fin with ribs and others having a support structure, to which was attached actual cloth sailcloth. For this small zeppelin, I decided on the former for its ease at this relatively small scale. This decided shape I then cut out of an index card stock I had lying around. To give them age and interest, I sponged them with a light brown watercolor (not pictured, sorry!)

Index stock fins cut out

Index stock fins cut out

I then had to make the ribs, and to make it simple, yet appealing, I decided to cut these out of a similar stock, but in this case, since they would be painted anyway, I decided to use cereal box cardboard and then paint them to contrast and have interest. Remember, I throw nothing away that may have a raw materials use when reused, repurposed or recycled!

Fin ribs cut from cereal box cardboard

Fin ribs cut from cereal box cardboard

I painted them by spraying a basic green enamel. I did this because a water-based paint would have been repelled by the coating on the cereal box. I then antiqued a patina on with a lighter water-based green acrylic, then applied to the fins.

Finished fins

Finished fins

After finishing the fins, I glued them at top and lower angled positions to the airship body with standard white glue and let them dry. To add another element of interest, I used dimensional paint to “dot” copper rivets on the fin ribs. I forgot to mention that I had done this to the propeller scaffolding as well. (How many of you noticed that?) So here’s the finished attachment…

Attached fins

Attached fins

Next time, I’ll show the process of building the gondola. It’ll be fun too, because it isn’t your run-of-the-mill boat shape!

Stay tuned…in fact, tell all your ‘punk friends to subscribe!

 
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Posted in Recycled and Re-purposed, Sculpture, Steampunk

 

The airship propeller

31 Jan

Last time I finished putting the propeller support scaffolding on the steampunk airship that is to be part of my diarama. Now I’ll start the propeller itself.

I can’t emphasize enough that you don’t need to buy much in order to create amazing art. Just look around you…I save plastic jar lids, pen barrels, scrap paper and fiberboard, plastic closures, fixtures, hangars, fasteners…everything. I’m a hoarder only in the sense that what I save looks like junk, but it all has artistic value when you realize it can be repurposed, reused, recycled and otherwise transformed into cool things of beauty!

To start the propeller, I found a piece of medical equipment my brother gave me. It’s an inline tube filter (new of course) that’s used in a suction device for surgery, but it looks very “hub-like”. I simple glued flat toothpicks at regular intervals around the perimeter of the “hub” and let them dry.

Propeller hub

Propeller hub

Flip side

Flip side

Once dry, I spray painted the piece an antiqued copper color and then gave it a patina of green “rust”. For the propeller blades, I cut triangles of a white scrap printing paper I had, gently curled one point for pitch and glued the edge to the toothpicks. I used some plastic pieces to stilt the blades while the glue dried.

Blades added

Blades added

Here’s the finished propeller…

Finished propeller

Finished propeller

And now we slide the propeller onto the end of the airship. I used a skinny plastic straw as the shaft and I split it and frayed the end so that by holding it together, I was able to slide the propeller onto it, and once the frayed end was inside the hub, it spread out enough to lightly hold the propeller on without glue. This way, I can manually spin it!

Propeller in place and spinnable!

Propeller in place and spinnable!

Next post, I’ll build the stabilizer fins, so stay tuned… :)

 

 

 

 
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Posted in Papier-mâché, Recycled and Re-purposed, Sculpture, Steampunk

 

Let’s get a handle on things!

24 Nov

Before the Thanksgiving Holiday, I showed you the clasp on the Calvin & Hobbes snowman themed ukulele case I’m building. Now, I want to show you the handle I concocted. A ukulele isn’t very heavy, and even with the weight of the recycled cardboard and paper case, the total weight isn’t more than a few pounds. The handle needed to be strong enough to manage the weight of the uke and case, plus any torque and stress from carrying it.

I decided to use a piece of square 5/16″ wooden dowel that I had on hand as it was light and strong and could be securely drilled and glued. I also wanted to put a “sleeve” on the handle so it was more comfortable to hold onto.

Cardboard sleeve and wooden dowel

I started by cutting pieces to hold the handle away from the case, then cutting a piece to be the handle itself. I then rounded the ends of the handle and since the sleeve was a black cardboard tube, I used a black permanent marker to color the ends of the wooden dowel.

Handle pieces with black marker

From here, I glued one handle end and clamped it, then drilled it to accept a bolt. I could only glue one end at a time because i have to be able to slip the cardboard sleeve onto the dowel.

Glued, clamped and drilled

Now I’m able to slip the sleeve on and it looks the way it should…

Handle with cardboard sleeve

With the sleeve on, I then glued and clamped the other end, then drilled it for bolting.

The other end glued and clamped

The handle can now be screwed to the case with some wood glue for strength and stability. The handle matches the look of the case and is pleasing and functional.

Handle attached

We’re coming into the home stretch… Next time I’ll show how I added the interior support structure that holds the ukulele in place and cushions it while in the case. Don’t go away…we’ll be right back!

 
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Posted in Papier-mâché, Recycled and Re-purposed

 

Texturing the giraffe

17 Jan

Last post, I said that I was going to start painting next, but I decided to add a texture over the cloth mâché. I thought that instead of being smooth, the giraffe might gain some character if I applied a filler and tooled it to look a bit like fur. This might sound a bit odd, but I just bought some cheap latex caulk, squirted it on and tooled it using a piece of hair comb. The effect was pretty good as you can see.

Fur texturing

Around the eye, it looks like this…

Eye detail

And still more!

Mouth detail

Next, I’ll start getting a base color laid down over the texturing. Couldn’t you just imagine this hanging in the kid’s section of your local library? It would definitely get noticed!

 
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Posted in Cloth-mâché, Papier-mâché, Recycled and Re-purposed, Sculpture

 

Adding the fin struts

09 May

OK, so I took a brief hiatus from posting the progress of the steampunk airship I’m working on to post a couple other items of interest. Now I’m back on the schedule and today’s installment is putting the fin struts on the airship body. These are the structures that will support the fins and provide some profile interest to the piece. The struts are made of repurposed materials, as you knew they would be…in this case, scotch tape cores and vitamin bottle lids! I had to cut the cores to match the contour of the zeppelin body ridges, paint them, then push a drilled out and painted vitamin bottle lid into the top of them.

Repurposed pieces for fin strut

Repurposed plastic...stuff you'd usually toss!

By themselves, the pieces of reused plastic don’t look like much, but add some brass color paint and put a green patina on them and they start to look like…well, something. Then add them to the construction of the airship and they start to make a bit more sense.

Lid pressed into core

When these pieces are added to the body of the airship, you can see how they will lift the fin away from the body of the airship and give it a dynamic look.

Fin strut attached to airship body

Three of these struts attached as shown will hold each of the airship fins.

Three fin struts attached in a row

Next we start attaching the fins! Don’t touch that dial!

 
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Posted in Recycled and Re-purposed, Sculpture, Steampunk

 

Accent ribbing

02 Mar

Last post, I talked about doing a patina on the new airship, including the copper accents on the ridges. I decided to add rivets, then apply a heavier green patina to them and the results are…well, fantastic!

Rivets and patina added

Below is a bit closer look to show the details.

Rivet and patina detail

In keeping with my tradition of using stuff that is just sitting around or was going to be thrown away, these accent stripes are nothing more than cloth coach tape, painted with copper paint, cut into strips and patina painted with green paint. The rivets are just puffy paint, applied in dots. MAGIC!

The next step will be to start adding some external elements. (I know…I said that last time, but an artist DOES change things on the fly if need be!).

What ideas do you have for details? Let me know!

 
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Posted in Papier-mâché, Recycled and Re-purposed, Sculpture, Steampunk

 

Green aging the airship

25 Feb

The next step in the building of the new airship was to make it look a bit aged and to add some tint. I did this by airbrushing a dark green color on the “envelope” and the copper edging.

Green patina aging

Patina detail

Next, I’ll start showing the pieces that will make this look like a lean and mean airship! Stay tuned!

 
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Posted in Papier-mâché, Recycled and Re-purposed, Sculpture, Steampunk, Uncategorized

 

New airship design

23 Feb

OK, so I have to admit that I’ve been holding out on you guys a bit. I have several airships in process, but I’ve mainly been showing you one particular design that I’m making progress on. This design is much like the one that is in Off the Beaten Path in Farmington, Michigan…you know, this one…

Up, up and away!

Truth is, there’s another design that I’ve been spending most of my time on, but I haven’t shown you that one. Wait… you may have seen it from afar, but didn’t realize it was special.

The new design has a much more hardcore steampunk look than the previous model, which was more Victorian whimsical, I think. This airship is going to look mean and aged and battlescarred.

The next photo is of the “balloon” portion of the airship when I first painted it.

Gray basecoated airship "envelope"

I then added copper ribbing for effect…

Copper ribbing added

Next time, I’ll show the ship with some patina aging…stay tuned!

 
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Posted in Papier-mâché, Recycled and Re-purposed, Sculpture, Steampunk

 

Gecko mosaic

07 Feb

Today, I’m shifting out of my usual paper mode and showing my love for mosaic. I’ve done mosaic in ceramic tile, glass, stone, terra cotta, and paper, and I love them all. This particular piece is a small bookshelf I built from essentially scrap birch plywood. I stained it a really cool viridian-ish green, then pieced together a mosaic on top using scrap ceramic tile and glass beads and finally grouted with a blueberry grout. Mosaics are definitely a labor of love because unless the pieces are all uniform tiles in a pattern, they are cut or broken to fit or make specific shapes. The latter is the case with this mosaic, as you can see. Maybe one day, I’ll do a steampunk paper mosaic on a papier mache form, then I’ll have most of my bases covered!

Gecko mosaic bookshelf

Left detail

Right detail

 
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Posted in Mosaic, Recycled and Re-purposed

 

Flight

28 Jan

In order to give the appearance that these airships could really navigate the aether, we must also add fins, or vertical and horizontal stabilizers if you’re more aviation engineering minded. These fins are also created using a papier mache process. Although I’ve entertained using something different because doing mache to the fins is so tedious, it still remains a strong, yet light-weight medium with which to accomplish the task, so I stick with it.

I start by cutting out a fin-shaped piece of corrugated cardboard, then I glue ridges onto them, corresponding to the scalloped edge shape. The ridges are really the leftover curved strips that I saved which came from between the airship ribs when I cut them out. In keeping with my recycle/repurpose philosophy, I try not to waste much and I try not to have to cut something again or go out and buy something that I probably already have if I just think about it a little bit!

Once that is done, I use a wide masking tape to cover and seal the cardboard against the mache moisture, then I go over the entire surface of the fin…both sides and around all edges, with papier mache strips. It’s very important to do this step as smoothly and without wrinkles as possible.

I then paint the fins after the mache is dry and accent them in whatever colors and textures are appropriate for the airship I’m working on. The finished fin is shown below.

What colors or patterns would you use on an airship?

Finished fin

 
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Posted in Papier-mâché, Recycled and Re-purposed, Sculpture, Steampunk

 

Airship progress continues…

17 Jan

Since I’m showing the progress of the airships I have in the works, the next step in the construction involved applying layers of mache over the skeleton structure. I then added a final layer of cut paper to give the desired texture and color appearance I was looking for. I wanted the airships to have an antiqued/aged parchment look and next I’ll add to the color of the paper by dry brushing  a nice accent tint.

Front view showing parchment look

Double layer of mache "skin"

Stay tuned for the color addition. I have a third airship in progress as well. That ship is going to be quite different from the two you see here. The color of the third ship is much more of a gray and the body of it will be quite different in style as well.

What suggestions do you have for ships you’d like to see?

 
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Posted in Papier-mâché, Recycled and Re-purposed, Sculpture, Steampunk