Nearly there...

For the sets I drew everything by hand in ink and then scanned it onto the computer. First I tidied the line work up in live trace as this kept it looking rough and hand drawn, then I transferred these images into Photoshop and coloured the line work and used flat colour with a texture over the top on a very low opacity. I used a water texture for the waves, and a wood grain texture for the boat piece, then used the same worn-paper texture on everything (the same one I used on the story boards).

All the set pieces were printed onto matt bond paper for a high quality finish, and the fact that it's matt means that it won't reflect the lighting when I'm animating.

To assemble the pieces I first cut them all out with a scalpel...

Next step was to cut some card strips to create a framework for the back of each piece to make it rigid so it could stand upright. Originally I was going to mount the pieces on card and cut them out, but this wasn't very economical and the card was very thick so it would be difficult to cut the details out without it looking messy. These pieces were glued onto the back of the printed pieces...

To create the waves, which will be animated by sliding back and forth, I created a rig from card. At first I had intended for each wave to stand by itself so it could be moved independently of the others, but the pieces on the back to stand it up would need to be long enough to counterbalance the weight and this would mean the gaps between the layers would be too wide. The solution was to have alternating waves on one piece of rig. The rigs were made from the same rigid card as the frame. I'm not sure how to explain how it was made, hopefully the pictures are pretty self explanatory...

The first image shows the strip that was scored and glued to created the sections that the waves would be glued to. The flat side of this and the sides of each vertical section were glued to an 'L' shaped piece of card...

A corresponding piece was made in the same way, this time without a side piece as the 2nd set of waves would need to slide through this...

Once the alternating pieces were glued to the rig, this provided one half of the entire piece...

The same was done for the other half with the other set of alternating waves, but with a mirror image of the rigging parts. For the 2nd half of the rig the waves were glued to the outer edge first, then this was placed along side the other half of the rig, with the waves alternating. The other end of the waves were glued to another strip to keep them in place, and interlocking the two halves of the rig. These can now be slid back and forth using the two end pieces allowing the waves to be animated. Man, I'm not sure any of that made sense! haha, just look at the photo below, it's pretty clear how it works, I think...

So next up I needed to finish the model...

I marked out where the hole needed to be for the head and drilled a hole. I worked out roughly how deep the hole needed to be and then once it was done, I gradually trimmed down the silicone around the neck, filled the hole with a glue gun and then pushed it on and held it in place...

So here he is. There are still some things I need to fix, after animating I'd like to go back and tidy up the legs and paint them with the same solution I used on the arms and neck, just so they all match, and I need to re sew the trousers, but they won't be seen in the animation so it can wait, it's more for myself, to make the model look a bit more finished.

The mouth in the photo is a small piece of black card held in place with blu tack. I prefer the card mouths I made but they're so small and fiddly so I'll be using the sculpey ones I made; they're just like the granny ones only painted in a flesh tone slightly darker than his face. They make him look like he's got Mick Jagger lips, but I think they might work better for animating, we'll just have to see how it goes...