Pips Hands Part 1

 I did make a pair of what I though were some pretty good hands, but it turns out they were way to big for my puppet. Argh! Sadly I had to destroy the hand (see photo below) in order to salvage the armature parts.

I then re-sculpted a much smaller hand which was better proportioned for my puppet.

The smaller hand with the same texture as the leg sculpt and spike detail.

Yoricks Shoes

 I had planned to sculpt both shoes separately.  However after sculpting the first shoe I noticed it was pretty symmetrical and could therefore get away with just casting the same one twice. This saved me a lot of time and hassle

I didn't put too much detail on to the shoe because I know there are no close up shots of it in the film.

I did add a kinds of sock shape/detail to the shoe just in case the trousers moved and reveled the armature.

Sculpting Pips Legs Part 2

Here's the second part of the leg/foot sculpting process.

Below I have added some detail to one foot and have roughly shaped the other. I wanted to challenge myself so I decided to add some fine detail which led me to sculpting the toenails as well.

 

I added some texture to the legs using the grip section of my sculpting tools. I then very lightly baked the legs (Thank you Sean Gregory for that tip) to prevent the loss of the texture in the laying up stage.

 

 Nothing fancy going on here. All I've done is add the corner keys and cut the excess plasticine off.

Boxing it all up. I do not recommend using regular cardboard for this stage. Despite using plenty of Vaseline to both 'waterproof' and lubricate the box it absorbed a lot of water from the plaster and started to sag.

Here's the first half of the cast. Now to add some draining gaps for excess silicon and box it up again.

WINGS (working title) Animatic

Here's a very rough animatic of my short film about a young unappreciated fairy on a quest to earn his wings.

Sculpting Pips Legs Part 1

Next I wanted to start sculpting Pips legs. The first thing I did was wrap PTFE Tape (plumbers tape) around the joints to keep them clean and free from sculpy. Last year I used Super Sculpy Flesh for sculpting but I found it warmed up too quickly and was difficult to work with. This year I'm using Super Sculpy Firm which so far is much easier to work with.

 So far I have only roughly shaped the legs and feet. I usually start by adding more than the required amount of material before carefully removing what is not needed.

Pip Armature

Its finally that time of year again when I get to start making puppets.

Woohoo!

I'm starting with the armature for my main character Pip. I am custom building a ball and socket armature for this character because he needs to be durable for filming. All the components were purchased at malvern-armatures.co.uk

Here's a close up for you.

 

Digital Props

Here I was Experimenting with Photoshop (polygonal lasso tool) to quickly create coloured props and a few different angles using my hand drawn pages as a template/base.

Hand Drawn Props

I know a lot of people like to draw straight into Photoshop and produce all their art work digitally. 

I much prefer to start with the more traditional approach of pencil on paper, I feel much more in control of the lines and I like the rough look of the drawings. I find with that with Photoshop I'm far too tempted to continuously undo and re-draw lines until they're 'perfect'. This uses up valuable time and sometimes ruins the overall look of the drawing.

Turnarounds

The turnarounds of both my characters. I'm really looking forward to building these guys.

 I really should start doing three quarter views as well.

Pre Production

 It seems to have been rather a long time since I last posted. Over the last few months I have produced a lot of work for the pre-production of my third year film and I figured it was time to share some of it.

Below are the color test/development/experiment sheets for my two characters Pip  and Yorick.