Making pantomime costume head - completed vulture head

The finished vulture head



Shown below is the original mask with the papier mache casing removed. The cling film barrier layer can be seen. This stops the PVA sticking to the underlying model.

The two halves are removed by cutting in half symetrically - lengthwise along the centre of the head, from front to back.These were later stuck back together with reinforced packing tape along the join, which had a strip layer applied over it to hide the join.

After painting and detailing with marker pen the finished head was varnished with 3 layers of flooring varnish.

Vulture head - pantomime costume

Vulture head - pantomime costume
Originally uploaded by rosemarybeetle

Head for a pantomime goose costume - part 2

Beak, shown against the rough sketch design. 








Goose sketches to help fix the design in the brain.

Constructing the framework for the skull of the head using withies (green willow sticks)







Building up the outer shape of the head by applying cardboard contouring

Cardboard head contours almost finished

Papier mache applied over cardboard contouring.









Complete head fully covered in papier mache outer layer.

Crow head model

Crow head - shaped chicken wire with xmas-decoration baubles for eyes, skinned with silver gaffer tape
Positive model to be used as a forma over which to apply papier mâché.
November 2011

Head for a pantomime goose costume - part 1

Agreed to make some costumes for pantomime.
Trying to make several bird heads, starting with a goose. A quick while on Google images and I found some great goose shots. First thing is to copy out and draw them a few times. This helps fix the shapes in the brain.





Once the picture is in the head, drew a quick final rough largish sketch to work from.The beak is the most important piece, as it is the defining shape of the bird head (birds' heads are pretty much all the same shape, except for the beak)





 To create the beak, used some soft builder's mineral insulation. This is much the same as Oasis, the green stuff used in flower arranging 

Started by roughing out the block in outline form







With a carving knife (my trusty 12" ham slicer), sliced out the detail of the beak shape.






Once shaped, a bit of light sanding got rid of the visible cut marks from the knife blade







With final details carved and finished - ta da - one beak, shown against the rough sketch design. 

Head needs a controller

The remote control automata reading lamp head needs a suitably daft controller.
It uses a playstation 2 analog joystick as the input device,

but this needs something more anatomical to skin it with. It has been suggested a hand would be rather ironically appropriate. It should look like this, but match the MDF finish of the head

image from wpclipart.com

Arduino workshop

Have recently been in Atlanta at a great workshop run museum multimedia techies.
Here we hacked together 4 arduiono projects in about 3 hours

A prototype theramin. the tone rate changed, but didn't quite get the pitch to work

A light show controlled by changes in ambient light

Slide the glass game using proximity detectors

There was also a Flash animated fish in a Flash fishtank controlled by proximity detectors

3-d printing

This table is pretty nifty...













And is actually just printed out using a rather cool 3-d printer

Making high power (3W) LED eyeballs for the automaton

New eyeballs

The eyeballs in my automaton head work OK, but are woefully underpowered. Time to make some new ones!
This is looking at the basic starting point of a detachable eyeball from the front look towards the back. The hole is where the housing goes.

The housing is the (more or less) parabolic reflector from a torch

The eyeball is made detachable by adding a rubber grommet, which allows it to be pushed tight onto the servo control rod. The rubber friction holds it tightly in place.

The eyeballs are ready to attach, although not cosmetically finished yet.

Here they are hooked up to the breadboard to test how they work

They are remarkably more powerful. Each LED is 3W, which is pretty bright. It hurts t0 look straight into them

You can see how much more powerful the 3W led is on the left


Here the test is to see how much light they give off in total darkness. The head is meant to be a bedside/reading lamp with remote control directable beam, via the eyeballs.

Testing shows this is plenty of light!

Close-up it's easier to see how much light is given off.