Withies & Hyena Struggles

Today started out with a quest for willow withies. Whilst we initially thought we'd have to order these, we found out the university had quite a large stockpile that we could just replace nearer the end of the project. This meant that we could jump straight into soaking them, without having to worry about waiting for them to arrive.

Without the professional equipment (aka a bathtub) required so soak willow's full length unbent, we had to resort to using a large plastic bin. By soaking the bottom half of the withies first, we were able to bend them to fit entirely in the bin with a weight and a piece of MDF on top to keep them all in.

We plan to use these withies for sculpting the elephant's face and body, and the giant mufasa head's separate pieces, to be formed and held together by the child actors.

We also began sculpting on the armatures we'd found and made. Rhian started on the cheetah, Andrea started on Nala and I did some work on the hyena on a sheet of MDF. It wasn't important for the hyenas to be on a 3D armature because they weren't masks to go on a hat - the design showed them as hand held puppet heads, with a fabric drape and mane reaching up to the child's head. This also worked well for the children - being young, they didn't have to worry about having a weighty mask on their head, or not being able to see well enough.

The Armature. It doesn't look much more than a blob of foil, mainly because it was. It's purpose was to give the sculpt structural integrity and to use up less clay.

My design for the hyena's face.

In the afternoon I met with Amy, Andrea and Lorraine to discuss materials with Fiona. There were some things we were definite about - such as the elephant being made out of willow withies with a fabric covering - but others remain up in the air awaiting prototypes. After some discussion we set out on a mission to make some material prototypes. I finished the hyena sculpt that day in order to be able to experiment with materials on it. I finished the day by typing up a materials list for each of the animals that was as comprehensive as I could make it at the time.

The sculpt after some intensive work on it.

After I had finished the hyena sculpt, I tried out some ideas for easily replicating the masks. This proved challenging and I was battling with the hyena until the university shut in the evening.

 

Above is the sculpt with clingfilm applied to keep it moist, and a couple of layers of masking tape over the top. Drawing on the shapes helped to emphasise how the mask would come out, and I felt it matched my concept art well. However, it was problem solving on how to actually sturdily and cheaply replicate this sculpt that was puzzling.

The masking tape pattern after being removed from the sculpt.

I decided to cut the pattern into the pieces I'd drawn on and tried to cut the shapes out of cardboard to see if we could glue them together to form the mask. However, I found the cardboard too rigid by nature, and getting it to fit together was a challenge that was taking far too long. Had we received the training for it, my dream way of making all of the masks in this project would be to sculpt them on the computer and render them in a low-poly style, then use software to 'unfold' the sculpts into a 2D pattern to be cut out of our chosen flat material.

The cardboard lower jaw sitting below all the other pieces. As you can see by the way it sits, the tape pattern is rather rounded and curved due to the nature of hand sculpting clay. The lower jaw sits very rigid.

With the failure of the cardboard mask being put behind, I ended my evening with another layer of clingfilm and started gum taping on the mask. This preserves the shape very well - and we will see how sturdy it is after a few layers.