Manos5

getting ready for the second casting with an actual armature inside it this time.

I forgot to mention what I was doing for that. Originally I wanted my dad to help me machine a ball-and-socket armature. You know, like they used in the Corpse Bride and Nightmare Before Christmas. Badass shit that's made of metal rods and joints, unlike wire which breakes after a time. Unfortunately my dad, who has 20+ years experience creating tools to be used on creating space stations and works around heavy industrial lathes and mills everyday, is also somewhat conservative when it comes to projects. He did not quite understand that I wanted him to teach me how to use a lathe & mill via a few simple ball-and-socket joints as outlined from this great armature machining book I got, but interpreted my desire as a request for him to help me make the whole blasted thing.

My dad, bless his soul, is creative in his ways for 'making do in a pinch' with whatever's on hand or is easily/cheaply available. That and we didn't quite connect on how some of the joints I wanted to create should work. Somewhere along the lines communication got lost and as I was running out of time I decided to go with the tried and true aluminimum method for things.

Anyway, a B&S armature would've been insane to try and fit into the puppet anyway. You can see just how curved I had to make the wires to fit into the casting without rubbing up on either side of the mold. Yay warped design again : / I don't have any photos of the latter stages but I pretty much did what I did for the dancer puppet and covered the portions of the armature that I didn't want to move with some putty epoxy "bones" that I then covered with... what was it this time? dryer sheet scraps? ...so as to give the silicon something to grip to on the armature. That stuff will peel off anything other than itself ^.^ Putty epoxy is awesome stuff though. Squish equal parts of A and B together and in 20 minutes you'll have a rock-solid fixative that's not very amenable to sculpting, unfortunately. Don't use it anywhere people live though - it stinks to low heaven and high hell with toxic fumes as it's setting.