The goal of this project was to make a self-illuminated boat for the opening of the Tempest. It needs to be sturdy enough to tour, but also needed to match the materials in the rest of the design, which were fairly industrial. We first made patterns of stiff paper to find the shape of the […]
Tempest build, the boat photos Read More »
Oh my heavens. Look at the beautiful paper work that Paper Forest found. The whole collection is stunning and interesting, both as fashion (Rob loves it) and as cut paper art. In the photos of the catwalk, the last series shows the models tearing the dresses off. On the one hand, I wince, but on
Well, my three lovely ladies are leaving home tomorrow. I’m shipping the Coraline puppets to Bill Shaffer at Subterranean Press. He in turn will send one to Neil Gaiman, one to Dave McKean and one to someone who pre-ordered the special edition of Coraline. I wanted to make certain that I had good photos of
With Halloween fast approaching, it seems like a good time to do a little project. Check out Skull-A-Day, which has a Papercraft Skull that you can make at home. The jaw moves via a tab that sticks out the back. Via Puppetbuilding Edited to add: Peterbilt spotted this “…amazing paper interpretation of Transformers’ Bumblebee, complete
Papercraft Skull (with Articulated Jaw) Read More »
Emily DeCola has been hired to create puppets for the African Children’s Choir. She started with these design drawings and has hired me to help her build the puppets. My primary job on the fish is to take her drawings and translate them into patterns that can be quickly reproduced for the sixteen fish puppets
The new They Might Be Giants Video uses paper robots in a really delightful animation that should feed your steampunk, robot, paper, animation loving impulses. It’s good. You’ll like it. I particularly like the robot gladiators. Spotted at the Paper Forest
When I was in high school on the debate team, and then again in college, my coaches emphasized the importance of finding primary sources. My debate partner and I had that particular lesson hammered home when we lost a round because we had relied on a secondary source, a newspaper article. It was reliable, the
Researching cherries for Shades of Milk and Honey Read More »
There’s a certain euphonious delight happening with that title. Anyway, we are now into the part of the build where I am creating the final dolls. Everything goes much, much faster once I’ve got the patterns created. At the moment I have a pile of body parts on my table waiting for me to assemble
Coraline Assembly Line Read More »
As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to make the spacebar on the Kowal Portable Typewriter and Adding Machine out of something mimicking ebony. I’ve been meaning to do this post for ages, but kept putting it off until I’d had a chance to test it all and make sure there weren’t any surprises. A number
The Kowal Portable Typewriter’s Spacebar Read More »
I’m sorry, I meant to post these photos yesterday. To a certain degree creating the clothes for this paper doll is much like creating a costume for a human. I start by draping my “muslin” (in this case a soft, white, rice paper) to get the shape I want. I can’t use exactly a pattern
After I built the legs and checked for sizing, I added a small aluminum bar across the top, using the cloth and Zap method that I’ve mentioned before. This is so that the string I’m going to use to tie them to the torso doesn’t rip through the top of the leg. I drilled two
Attaching Coraline’s legs Read More »
The legs start the same was as the arms did, so we’ll skip all that and go straight to the knee joint. I glue two pieces of fabric to the back of the leg, making sure that the joint is completely snug. It is important to have things tight, so that I don’t have slop
Once again, I return to the drawing. This is one of the places that I took a shortcut. Were I in a studio, I would have done a top-down view of Coraline in addition to the front and side to make it easier to delegate construction. Using the front and side view, I get the
I started making Coraline’s body. I’m going to walk you through the process to make an arm; the rest of the body follows pretty similar principals. To start with, I take the initial scale drawing that I did of Coraline and turn it into a technical drawing. Which is to say that I decide where
I finally hit on the final pattern for Coraline’s face, today. Just for kicks, I took a picture of all the drafts that made it to pattern stage. There were, I don’t know, maybe five other iterations of her face that weren’t good enough to pattern. Making the lips happen was a pain in the
The many faces of Coraline Read More »