Orange Rabbit

This is another project along the lines of the FlowerFace one (previous post). After ordering a rabbit form at the same time as the coyote one used for my other project, I got the idea to do a neon colored rabbit. Here's how I did it.


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First we have the rabbit form and the plaque. The plaque is a size 9x12. The form is for a jackrabbit- a little bit bigger than a normal rabbit. That piece of (faux) fur next to it was to test out and see if painting it with acrylic paint would work. It didn't- it ended up looking wet and spiky.


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Next we have to attach the fur. We have a huge box of white faux fur from when my brother made his girlfriend a teddy bear (really!). Apparently he bought way too much. Anyway, I got thinking about how to color it, since I wanted a neon rabbit. After trying paint and spraypaint, which didn't work very well, I settled on a neon orange paint pen. It works amazingly. So what I did was hot glue the fur on, and after gluing it, trimmed it, and then painted it. The progress shown in this picture took about an hour, since it was completed while watching Conan O'Brien.


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After attaching some of the fur I made the ears. I just used Super Sculpey, wire, and a little wire mesh. In retrospect I probably could have just used a wire outline and attached the fur around that. This picture is me testing out the position of the ears without gluing them down yet, since I still had to glue the fur on. Also, that wire going across the ear needed to be clipped off later. Woops.


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It helps to draw lines on the rabbit and then cut the fur into the correct shapes. That way, you can put it together like a puzzle. This picture also shows the eyes. I bought a lot of 100 blank glass eyes on eBay. I needed to carve away a little bit of the foam around the eyes, since the glass eyes were a tad bigger. For this I used a sharp hook shaped tool for ceramics. I just painted the back of the eyes with acylics, and they were hot glued on. Also, note the lint roller in the background of this picture. The hair gets /everywhere/.


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Here's another picture of the rabbit as I kept adding the fur and coloring it. The ears were attached at this point. They look a bit fat, which is why I should have just skipped the clay and only used wire. You can see the uncolored fur on the face, which had to be trimmed a lot.


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After attaching all the fur, I colored it. I colored it a bit as I glued it, just so I wouldn't get bored cutting and hot gluing. In retrospect I could have saved some paint by gluing and trimming all the faux fur before coloring it. This only took one paint pen, but it was basically completely gone when I finished. In this stage, it wasn't glued to the plaque yet, I was just seeing how it looked. It also needs whiskers and I have to color in the nose.


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This is a picture of the finished product. At this point I had already put it up in my house to surprise my family, so I had to climb up to get a picture. You can see the whiskers and the painted nose/mouth in this photo. The whiskers were made with some kind of clear thin plastic string that I bought at a hardware store, and the nose was painted with acrylics. The whiskers were just hot glued and then stuck into the fur on the nose.


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That's it! Since this one was relatively easy, especially compared to the FlowerFace one, I have already ordered more rabbit forms to make other neon rabbits. One day I might have an army of them to sell.

FlowerFace WIP (Part 1)

This is something I've been working on for my wall. FlowerFace, so nicknamed by one of my friends at school. Of course, at the moment, he doesn't have a flowery face, but he will at some point.

I thought I'd show the progress of what I'm doing so far.

First, an image showed up in my head of this character's head on a hunting plaque. I thought it'd be sort of funny and interesting, so I set about looking for methods of making it.

Interestingly, someone had made a tutorial on a similar thing a couple years ago (for a werewolf head). However, I wasn't going to make a hairy creature, so I need to figure some things out on my own.


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First I made some sketches to get a feel for what animal I'm basing this off of. FlowerFace's body seems to be an awkward combination of a rabbit and deer, and the base of it's head is more like a coyote with longer ears.

Since I'm only making a head, it was easy to just get a foam-ish-plastic-probably-toxic-material in the shape of a coyote. I used Van Dyke's because they were having a sale.


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After I ordered the coyote form, I made a few more sketches of just the head, planning out specifics like the ears, eyes, and face. I used different colored pens to get a better understanding of the structure on the face. Like the picture on the top right, I used a red pen to determine the parts I would probably have to modify from the coyote form. I didn't actually look at a photo of a coyote, since they're hairy and that wouldn't help me much. I just used my basic knowledge of dog-like heads.


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So, once the forms arrived in the mail (I also ordered a rabbit and full sized fox form, but those are for another post), I set up my "workspace". I used the ping-pong table in my basement, since nobody uses it anyway. I put down a lot of newspaper. This is a photo of what the form looked like before I changed any of it. Later I realized that instead of ordering a "wall mount" it was more of a "pedestal" form which wasn't intended for a wall. Shows how much I know about taxidermy. But I'll fix that bit later.


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Since I had sketched the head before, I got my sketchbook out and looked at the head studies I had done. Going from my imagination and the sketches, I took a Sharpie and drew some outlines of where I was going to add some bulk to the form. Places like the lips, muzzle, and above the eyes. Then I molded some Super Sculpey over the indicated spaces. I also hacked off the nose with a knife (and re-did it with the Sculpey) and scraped off some of the area around the ear which I knew I wouldn't want. In addition to that I also sanded down some of the lines from the molding (you can see them on the neck and head in the previous photo). Also, following the other guide (which I linked above), I did insert little bits of wire to anchor the teeth (which aren't finished in this photo). However, I don't know if it was necessary since FlowerFace doesn't have very large teeth.


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So now I have to dry on the clay. I found a way to prop up the hair drier with a garden glove and the head mold with some pliers. I only did this because otherwise the drier and head would fall over and move. In this picture, I'm drying the nose. Since I was paranoid about overheating the hair drier and blowing a fuse, I timed it by listening to my iPod and turning the drier off every 5-10 mintes, or if the drier seemed too hot.


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While I was drying the parts of the face, I went to work on the ears. First I bent some wire into the basic outline. Then I folded wire mesh (WHICH IS EVIL) over it. Then I filled it in with some more clay. Once they were both done I stuck them in the over for the amount of time it said to on the box.














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Remember when I said that the form I ordered wasn't intended for a wall? Well, it is now. I drew a line and sawed off the excess with a knife, and then sanded it so it was even.






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Now it's time to insert the ears. After taking them out of the oven I sanded them a little, just because I'm kind of OCD and I know I'm not going to be covering them with fur, so it'd be easier to see bumps and such. Using a clay molding tool I carved 2 holes where the ears go. I left some wire sticking out the bottom of the ears so I could keep it in place. Eventually I ended up hot gluing one of the ears in place because it was wobbling, which would be bad when adding the rest of the clay around it. This picture shows the mold with one of the ears "finished" being dried with the hair drier, which I propped up on a box with various stuff that was lying around.


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That's it for now. It's still a work on progress as I wait for the glass eyes that I ordered. After that it should be done pretty quickly and be in its new home on my wall.