Progress Update Part 2...

So the next update is a little one about the armatures for the bands video. I had originally planned to cast the armatures in silicone, so they which were fleshed out with plasticine to create a mould, but things went very wrong (see previous posts for rants!).

So I decided to use the same sort of techniques I used for Granny, which was to flesh the models out using wadding and wool. Turns out this technique has it's benefits, mainly the fact that the models are a lot lighter and so should hold their position better when animating. It also meant I could play with the shape more, adding bits and taking bits away, which would have been more difficult if casting the models.

The first job was to strip off aaalllllll the plasticine, which was quite fun but very messy! Then the boring bit, scrubbing each armature with warm soapy water and a toothbrush! I wanted to get as much of the plasticine off as I could and it was all stuck inbetween the twisted wire. Nightmare. 

But I got there eventually and returned to square one...

I'm not going to go into loads of detail about how I fleshed them out, it's pretty easy to figure out. It was just a case of adding clumps of wadding and neatly wrapping wool around them, making sure it was quite tightly packed so it wouldn't lose shape. I wasn't too worried about the arms being thinner than they needed to be as it will give me more room when it comes to sewing on the sleeves and trouser legs, I did pay more attention to the torso though...

So, a bit of a lazy post, but here are the models all padded out...

I had wound thread around the fingers to try and smooth them out ready to coat in a silicone solution, but I decided to remove it and try and fill the gaps with the silicone as when I would thread around Granny's fingers it restricted how easily the wire could bend.