stwberryzaiquiri

GENTLEMEN! BEHOLD!

its done. its FINALLY done! the project i started in january which i originally meant to turn in as homework for my art class one week later has now been completed after a mere 5 months ( ). in the following entry (which i will no doubt post in several groups as well) i willl show to you many a photograph of the stages of progression of my most long term and difficult project to date. many of them may seem similar, but bear with me till the end. cuz really how hard is it to look at pictures? lets begin shall we:

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last week of January and first week of February 2005

stage one:
well not -exactly- stage one but the first photo i took anyway. at this point frank is a wire skeleton bent into shape and covered in masking tape



these were originally going to be his eyes. obviously that changed later, but this is the best picture i have to show that the wire material looked like



stage two:
"oh no! its almost time to turn in my art project to the teacher! well i wish id been able to do more but i guess id better paint it so i can at least have something...no. no nevermind that looks like crap" so having decided that this project was nowhere NEAR finished, i brought in what i had and told the teacher what i wanted to do, and she said that was fine and she went ahead and gave me a good grade cuz...i dunno i guess im just special. (it should also be noted that this was one of the first things i did in that class, and that class ENDED about a month and a half ago, and im just finishing frank now)


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second and third weeks of February 2005

stage 3:
and thus the real work begins. i find this stuff in the garage called "celluclay" that i dont even know when we got it but we didnt have any normal clay so i worked with what we had. and thank god i did cuz now i love this stuff more than regular clay, and plan to use it more in future projects. it starts out as dust. dust consisting of finely ground up paper and some sort of glue. the result being that when you add water you get a fully pliable and sculptable form of paper mache. its feel is somewhat like particle board when its dry, and its also EXTREMELY sturdy.




i sculpted all the teeth individually and stuck them on one by one.

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fourth week of February and first week of March 2005

stage 4:
each time after the stuff dries from the previous session i can work a little more, adding things where ther need to be. it sometimes took more than one session to get a particular feature right because the medium tends to shrink a bit as it dries (tho that proved to work in my favor at one point)






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second and third weeks of March 2005

stage 5:
here is where the shrinkage factor (*snicker*..."shrinkage" ) worked out in my favor. while sculpting the ripples or ridges or whatever you want to call the things on his forehead, they ended up looking kind of too puffy. i mean if it had been nessecary i could have used a dremel tool to shape them after they dried but turns out the celluclay did that for me.

here it is wet:


and here it is dry:


better huh? and heres a shot of the inside just before i coated it. you can still see up inside the frame of the ears
stage 6:


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[there was a period here where nothing got done for a while, cuz i was just too busy with other things to have time for frank ]

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last week of April 2005

stage 7:
next came the ears. first i had to cover them both in a thin layer of the stuff, and then go back to add the details. i took some creative liberties with this part. the actual mask in the movie did not have so much of the "tree-root" looking things at the base of the ears but i liked the way it looked so i exaggerated that part a bit.


(i also did some detailing on the face just a bit here. made the cheeks smoother, made the hills and valleys on his upper lip more prominent, and filled in the gaps between some of the teeth)








stage 8:
for the final step in the sculpting phase, i decided his lower lip needed to extend a little lower



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first two weeks of May 2005

stage 9:
it may not look much different here but youll just have to take my word for it. a good 6 hours of manual sanding (manual meaning with little bits of sandpaper and my hands) went in to make the surface suitable for painting.



stage 10:
the painting begins. this is the primer coat. it makes it easier to see the details of the shape now that everything is a solid color.


next came a paint of my own mixture. they dont really make any one paint that matches franks odd metallic color so i had to buy several colors and mix up a batch of my own. i call the color "Shadow Steel". if anyone cares to make their own, my recipe is as follows:
using Model Master acrylic paints take 1 half oz jar of 'gunmetal', 2 half oz jars of 'silver', and 2 half oz jars of 'steel'. use a clean empty jar and mix them all together and then add just about a half teaspoon of 'gloss white'. this will give you quite a bit of paint to work with and as long as you keep the jar tightly sealed it can be stored and used again in the future.



next i painted the teeth using several coats of 'dragon white' and painted the inside of the mouth and the nostrils with 'dragon black'


then to give them some texture i used a dry brush technique to apply this 50/50 mixture of 'grey primer' and 'light ivory'


final stages:
there is a step i didnt take pictures of and that is the making of the eyeballs. that gave me a great deal of trouble. i was originally going to use "silly putty" eggs which i had ground off the logo from, but for some reason no variety of paint will bond with whatever plastic they are made from. so what i did was cover them in Super Sculpey. which is a wax-like molding compound that you then put in the oven for 15 minutes and it pretty much turns into plastic. this also allowed me to give the eyes a more natural shape, rather than have them as just plain ovals. anyway once id done that i was able to paint them very easily and then just use a hot glue gun to attach them into the sockets. once they were in i used a grey wash (which is paint that youve diluted with water) to make them more of an off-white so they didnt contrast so much with the teeth. after that was done the final step was simply adding a coat of clear gloss to the whole thing to make it shiny. so without further ado *drumroll pleeeeease*...i give to you the FINISHED MASK OF FRANK THE BUNNY!
















heres a before and after shot that i photoshopped together:



and then just for fun:




well ladies and gentlemen i hpe youve enjoyed looking at this big project as much as i have enjoyed working on it! now the only question is....what to make next?