Accidents/Tests

POSTDATED - 14/03/12

Today I blocked out the rest of the legs and glued them in place with more UHU. Stupidly, I decided regular UHU would probably do the same job as the special por stuff. Turns out I was only half wrong, so the legs ended up drying a bit crusty; still work though, so whatever.

While I was waiting for glue to dry I decided to test out a method of applying latex that I learned about while doing my dissertation. During my research on Ray Harryhausen I read about a method of fleshing out puppets he termed the 'build-up method'. Here, latex was soaked into cotton wool and wrapped around the armature to make up the muscles - or for the bones of the famous skeleton puppets from Jason and the Argonauts.

I was originally planning to test this out by making a whole skeleton, but quickly realised that this method is whole lot more time consuming than I thought. It did, however, work excellently, with the cotton wool giving the latex some substance to hold on to, and the whole thing clinging to the armature nice and strongly. After drying though, I found the latex difficult to adjust with a scalpel so I found out that any sculpted details would need to be carefully added before the latex had dried. With enough time and patience, however, this method seemed fairly straightforward.