Have a Seat, part two

Chris's chair is almost finished now!


If you were to ask me what I liked better, sculpting or upholstering, you know what I would say? ...Probably nothing, because I would still be out in the workshop upholstering THIS CHAIR. In other words, UPHOLSTERY IS A MAJOR PAIN IN THE NECK! .... that being said, it's finally almost finished now :-)

By the end of last week's post, the chair looked like this:



After having a slight character modification, it turns out the back of the chair is going to be way taller than it needs to be. This calls for some major changes to the chair...
Now when something like this happens, it is easy to get frustrated. But it is also easy to realize that, in these instances, backtracking is actually moving forward and making progress.





Here I carefully cut and peeled away quite a bit of stuffing. After measuring and marking exactly where the new back should be, I very delicately cut the back with a small hand saw. Here is the new back height:





To make the arms rounded, I carved them out of styrofoam with my handy-dandy styrofoam cutter. If you like using the wire styrofoam cutters, more power to you - I cannot stand those things!







There is a special type of styrofoam glue I like to use. Lots of glues (and almost anything in an aerosol can) will melt styrofoam. I have read from our buddies Justin and Shel (they post comments as "Jriggity") that liquid nails works pretty well too. Here is the stuff I used:




It works unbelievably well sticking styrofoam to styrofoam, but it really doesn't work that well on anything else.




And now comes the fun part.... the upholstering!! I couldn't tell you how many glue sticks I went through attaching all this fabric, but the burns on my fingers can attest to the fact that I was using the glue gun like a madman on this thing. I love the character on these arms! I can see the wood needs to have quite a darker stain though...



What you can't see on the following picture is that both sides of the chair are actually one piece of fabric, connected by the small strip at the bottom on the front of the chair. I had to make it all one piece or the seam would seem out of place. Not easy, let me tell you!



I used a product called "Nufoam" to shape the front mattress. You can cut it easily with a big pair of scissors.


Wrapping up the foam...



After experimenting with a few things, I decided to go with a sharp edge for the side of the mattress. It will look a little funny until the trim pieces are added, but once they are it is really going to 'pop'.









Over the past few weeks, I have been keeping my eyes peeled for some gold studs everytime I walked through an arts store. Well, the other day I came across the perfect find! These studs were on clearance for a couple bucks and are supposed to fit with some little girl's clothing stud machine. Don't ask me.... but they are the pefect size.



Only problem: they look brand new. This chair is going to be very aged by the end of this process, and bright shiny gold studding would look very out-of-place.



So I painted them, one at a time, with a rusty metalic paint. Then I went back over and scratched them with a razor blade so a little bit of the original gold would show through. My cell phone camera is always out of focus, but you can get an idea of the difference from this shot:



And after adding the studs.....






And that's all for Part Two! It might not have seemed like much of a difference, but it was a lot of work!! Stay tuned for Part Three. There still needs to be a thick trim around the seams and the feet need to be sculpted. Then the entire thing needs to be aged. Here is a sample pic of what the trim will look like (this was edited in Microsoft Paint):



-Duane

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Bunny Slippers

These babies are ready to be attached to a character, are fully animatable, and were handmade. Want to see how?

Stop motion is a very unique form of animation. In 3D animation, a character is typically "anchored" by his hips and animated from there. In 2D animation, you simply draw the character excactly where you want them. In stop-motion, however, the character needs to be very securely anchored to the set piece in order to animate tiny movements without the whole character falling down or moving. Anyone who has ever played with action figures or toys knows how hard it is to balance a toy on his feet... one simple bump and he falls over!

That's why it's crucial to have these characters very tightly secured to the floor. In fact, we bolt them to the set with each step they take!

That being said, I need to design a pair of bunny slippers for Chris to wear on his feet. And that's just the exterior... the interior needs to have a 1/4" bolt hidden somewhere that I can use to bolt him to the set. Let's get started!

Here is a simple piece of wood that I have marked to the appropriate thickeness. This will serve as the bottom plate of the feet.

It is always a good idea to make duplicate puppets (that's what you call a stop-motion character) of each character in the animation. That way, if something happens to the character in the middle of a scene (i.e. his hand breaks or something) you can swap them out on the fly and no one notices :-)

For Chris, I will be making four duplicate puppets. That's eight pairs of shoes. That's 16 bunny ears!! To make sure they are all exactly the same, I made a template of the shoe shape:

Now I sand down the sides to make them less jagged....

Now it's time to drill the hole for the bolt to go through. I mark them all ahead of time and drill it out. The diameter of the hole is slightly larger than the actual bolt itself (1/4", remember?) so that the bolt can slide in and out easily.

Finished!

As Chris takes a step, I want the bunny ears to flop up and down. With stop-motion, you want to have complete control over anything that is going to move. So I will be putting some annealed steel wire into the ears to hold them exactly where I want them. Here I am marking where the ears are going to end up and where the wires should stick out of the wood to match up with them.

There's a small step that isn't shown here, but it isn't really anything special. I tapped a small nail into the wood where the wires should be to make a little hole to put them into. Then I dabbed a little Gorilla Glue into the holes and stuck the wire in there to secure them. I also Gorilla Glued the 1/4" nuts over the holes I just drilled. Here is the finished product:

Notice in the background the bolts with the wingnuts on them (to the left of the picture). These are called tie-downs. The bolt is screwed into the nut (on the foot) from under the set. When you tighten the wingnut up, the character is really bolted down tight!

Here, I am putting one of the tie-downs into the nut to prevent anything from getting into the threads of the nut. You'll see why in a minute...

This stuff is called epoxy putty. It is stop-motion character designer's best friend!!

There are plenty of different types of epoxy putty and they all have a different cost. One of my secrets is that you can just buy the cheapest one. I have tried them all and have never seen a noticable difference in strength, so you might as well go with the cheapest.

Here's how epoxy putty works:

You slice off a piece of it, knead it together in your fingers until the two colors become one (see the black and gray in the piece in my hands below?), then mold it into the shape you want. Within five minutes, the stuff becomes hard as rock! This particular brand goes off in about two minutes, so I really have to work fast. The tie-down prevents any epoxy putty from gumming into the nut. Make sense now?

Starting to look a bit more like slippers.

Before putting the "fur" on there, I paint on a base color of white.

They look pretty good as it is, but they need some texture to give it that fuzzy look. You can buy white pieces of felt that are about the size of a normal piece of computer paper for 40¢ at almost any art store.

Cutting the felt out to the right size...

and laying the felt over the slippers....

I glued the felt to the slippers using some generic spray glue in a can. Sticky stuff! As for the bunny ears...

I found these little guys at an arts and crafts store called Michael's. For those of you here in the states, there are probably several Michael's in your home town. They're everywhere!

And viola! They are looking pretty close to what I had in mind.

After adding the eyes and noses from the miniature bunnies I bought at Michael's, they are really coming together!

Here's another angle...

And here they are!

I plan on attaching a piece of white fuzz to the back of the slipper for a little fluffy tail, but I'll have to experiment with that at a later time.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more updates coming soon!

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