a plaster cloth dog experiment

later that same night...

I started making this creature the night of the day that I was "guided" to start the Atomic Fireball/Happy Hour tin guy.

Besides the 365-creative-progress-report/daily-check-in-to-keep-myself-moving-forward thing, another purpose of this blog is as a place where I can show myself how I did something. Or to try things out and document how I did it so I can either repeat it or remember why it didn't work.



This guy started out as a Tootsie Roll container and a Twizzler container.


I am no longer using these empty Halloween candy containers for storage and they were in the recycle bin for Monday -- but I "needed" to rescue them.













In this position, this guy was looking like some sort of Hello Kitty creature or a robot head or something.















I taped it together...
















...but there was the "problem" of the neck/lid on the Tootsie Roll container...in this position this would be the back of the creature's head (which is how I was thinking about it).
















Then I wondered if it would fit on a tomato cage because the neck was looking too tall to be something cute.















I turned it around and now that it was no longer going to be cute, I figured this could be the face part of the head and I could build something onto the nose area.
















But what to use? How about that empty masking tape roll and the top of an Olay Cleansing Cloths box?











I taped it loosely to see if I liked it. It kinda looked like a dog to me.













So here comes the experimental part.


Instead of building the sides and underneath part of the muzzle/nose I decided to try to just make a "bridge" of masking tape and cover that with plaster cloth. Normally I would use wadded up paper balls and/or aluminum foil but I just wasn't feeling that ambitious.


I put two layers of tape all the way around and I was done for the night.









I noticed these aluminum foil ears sitting in the "save it for later pile" that I originally made for the goat-creature.

It's funny -- the goat-creature started out as a dog-like guy.














I lightly taped the ears onto the dog guy and was amused.

Now this was looking sort of beagle-y to me.


It also reminded me of...













...my "Working Dog" tile.















Jump to tonight.



I had a block of time open...already did the daily blog post, did my household chores for the day, nothing on television right now...I decided to give it a try.




I carefully put on a few triangles of plaster cloth to anchor the tape "bridge" pieces together...










...then I put the guy up on the table upside down so I could work carefully on the underneath parts.


To my surprise -- the unsupported tape "bridge" was not collapsing! Huh...I wasn't really expecting that. Cool.











It's not like this area of the face is going to be weight bearing or like the piece will be picked up and carried around a lot by holding it there.

Still, I wanted to put a good three or four layers on in that area.








While the piece was upside down -- and since I was having some degree of success with the experiment so far -- I decided to go another step farther and try to make a totally unsupported area. There are a few places around the bottom of the Twizzler container where it doesn't touch the tomato cage.

This area will absolutely be covered by other things later on, so this is a "safe" place to experiment.




I turned it right side up again and covered the rest of the head and did one more layer on the topside muzzle/nose bridge areas.

The parts that were partially hardened seemed to be pretty sturdy. The plaster cloth went on quite smoothly...wow.







Underneath the chin and on the throat -- those areas seemed pretty solid, too. Very cool. So far.










So now I will leave this guy to dry for a day or two and then I will check on the hardness of the nose/muzzle bridge.

I sincerely doubt I will ever try this again in such a large area but I am sure it will come in handy in a pinch some time.