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Step 4Building the Body (And hands!)
The upper body was made from a duct tape double of myself. I've never suffered from claustrophobia, but let me tell you this - being wrapped in duct tape will trigger this! If I ever decide to do this again, I'll also grab some blunt-nosed scissors so my partner doesn't poke me in the back again cutting the damned thing off :P
The hands were lifecasts purchased on ebay. I had no means at the time to cast my own hands, so I gypped out and bought them :D They were attached to the forearm pieces by the simple process of filling them with expanding foam and jamming the pipes deeply into the hands.
We'd made two duct-tape doubles - one of the chest, and one of just my arms - you can see in the images that the arm pieces came out more smoothly and with more definition than the chest piece did. The shirt used to make the arm pieces was threaded under and through the chest piece
Once that was done, I wrapped the base of both shirts around the pole tightly with duct tape, and cut a huge chunk out of the back to allow me to attach the wings to the PVC piping
In the images, you can see how I just jammed the wings in there and screwed them with 8g screws directly onto the pole. Since I was using thick foamboard as the base of the wings, I had no concerns about it ripping under the screws - although once both wings were added, the entire thing did nearly take flight at one point under the wind gusts of the day!
Once that was done a few more strips of duct tape secured the back of the double back down and around the wings for added security. (And to stop the peanuts escaping)
The rest of the body frame was made out of chickenwire. Since the base is hidden by the folds of the skirt, I used a staple gun to secure the bottom of the skirt to the base. With this step, make sure you get good quality chickenwire - you can shape it (and will need to do so quite severely) with creases for where you want your model to "drape" and secure it to the poles with standard zip (cable) ties.
Once that was done, I stuck the head on temporarily to position the hands. At this point we had a few people show up here and there, and the main question of the day was "WTF are you doing?"
Since the angle of a bent elbow is too sharp for PVC piping, they don't make fitting pieces that match it. So I had to get creative with some packing straps, some coathangers, and a metric ton of duct tape to make sure it wouldn't shift once I had worked out and positioned everything relative to the head. Once that was done, it was just a matter of attaching them to the shoulder pieces and holding them in place with 8g screws again. I also stuffed the breastpiece full of packing peanuts and bubblewrap to keep it in shape.
Once all that was done, the head was permanently attached, and bubblewrap and duct tape were used to pad the figure out
The hands were lifecasts purchased on ebay. I had no means at the time to cast my own hands, so I gypped out and bought them :D They were attached to the forearm pieces by the simple process of filling them with expanding foam and jamming the pipes deeply into the hands.
We'd made two duct-tape doubles - one of the chest, and one of just my arms - you can see in the images that the arm pieces came out more smoothly and with more definition than the chest piece did. The shirt used to make the arm pieces was threaded under and through the chest piece
Once that was done, I wrapped the base of both shirts around the pole tightly with duct tape, and cut a huge chunk out of the back to allow me to attach the wings to the PVC piping
In the images, you can see how I just jammed the wings in there and screwed them with 8g screws directly onto the pole. Since I was using thick foamboard as the base of the wings, I had no concerns about it ripping under the screws - although once both wings were added, the entire thing did nearly take flight at one point under the wind gusts of the day!
Once that was done a few more strips of duct tape secured the back of the double back down and around the wings for added security. (And to stop the peanuts escaping)
The rest of the body frame was made out of chickenwire. Since the base is hidden by the folds of the skirt, I used a staple gun to secure the bottom of the skirt to the base. With this step, make sure you get good quality chickenwire - you can shape it (and will need to do so quite severely) with creases for where you want your model to "drape" and secure it to the poles with standard zip (cable) ties.
Once that was done, I stuck the head on temporarily to position the hands. At this point we had a few people show up here and there, and the main question of the day was "WTF are you doing?"
Since the angle of a bent elbow is too sharp for PVC piping, they don't make fitting pieces that match it. So I had to get creative with some packing straps, some coathangers, and a metric ton of duct tape to make sure it wouldn't shift once I had worked out and positioned everything relative to the head. Once that was done, it was just a matter of attaching them to the shoulder pieces and holding them in place with 8g screws again. I also stuffed the breastpiece full of packing peanuts and bubblewrap to keep it in shape.
Once all that was done, the head was permanently attached, and bubblewrap and duct tape were used to pad the figure out
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