The Making of Demons and Creatures

As you can tell there is a lot of excess material on the waist which was intentionally left. The puppet will be moving a lot and I would rather have some excess cover underneath to hide the armature than accidentally running into an exposed gap to fix in post. A lot of pieces were too small for me to actually sew on such as the fly cover and those tiny pockets. That was made up for by tracing the shape with the sewing machine and stitching in where the missing pieces would be.

I was however able to sew in some back pockets by hands. The back portion was not fully sewn in order to have access to rig points and to make any repairs necessary.

After a set of hands were made, the sleeves were made with excess in case the sleeves were too short.

The body of the hoodie was rather improvised, using my own hoodie as a reference. I later hand stitched the sleeves onto the body and improvised the hood.

I sculpted around the armature with the screws in the armature so that I have access points to the set screws later in case of any wire breaking.

The design of the Demon character allowed it to be hidden in plain sight since he has a bunch of holes on his skin. I started sculpting the holes around the main access point holes.

After the sculpt was complete, I baked the sculpey and proceeded in making another mold for a torso cast. Because of all the details, I went in first with a couple layers of silicone to fill the holes in order to prevent any bubbles, and later poured the casts

So as you can probably guess by now the the main character and the demon character have the same face, so having that design in mind, I would only require one base mold to cast two heads. I would only have to sculpt one face to create both characters and cast multiple pieces. The top set of teeth were sculpted so that I can use it as a frame of reference and not worry about jittering when I need to animate

Once again more mold prepping and pouring.

Unfortunately the semester got extremely busy so I didn’t get a chance to take pictures of majority of the molding and casting process. I drilled out a hole for each cast so that I can embed tiny magnets to stick onto the base as showed above in the master base.

In order for me to get the mouth shapes, I sculpted the pieces under a camera and essentially animated the lip sync on its own. As you can see, there are some painted faces and some raw casts with brown apoxie sculpt. After each piece was sculpted and animated, I numbered them all and recorded the order onto a timing sheet for when I go to animate the full scene.

Here are a set of the final head pieces for the main character. The seam lines will be painted out in post afterwards

The resulting molds and some casts.

After getting some good casts I moved onto making some sockets. I plan to have small silicone casts for the eyeballs to sit in within the head so that I can move them around easily while animating.

To help keep the sockets stay in place I had some brass stock pieces to help keep them calibrated

Once I got the right shapes, the sockets were then prepped to be molded in plaster

The resulting mold and casts for the sockets. These will be used in order to make the base of the heads later.

After the hands were sculpted a mold was made so silicone casts can be made.

The master sculpts was prepped in clay so silicone can be poured in to create a two part mold. (I tried doing vertical molds with open pour spouts, but that didn’t work as well as I planned in the casting process)

The resulting molds and a set of the armature wire prepped for casting

A closer look at the cast. Some parts of the armature can be seen, due to being too thick and touching the walls in the mold. The hockey tape I used was exposed, but was later covered up in paint.

This step was repeated 3 more times for each leg. Patches of fur were hand sewn to cover the gap between his body and legs which were also later trimmed.

He’s made from a simple wire and apoxie armature, bulked up with foam and stuffing. I sewed out a pattern for his skin and later with fun fur with a separate tail with wire and yarn around it. His skull was sculpted out with apoxie scuplt, while the bones and portions holding the wire together is made with plumber’s apoxie.

I  later trimmed his fur so that he would have more of a mane and painted his skull white. You can see here he has little plush feet for now and didn’t really have any form of tie downs, however he’s capable of standing without toppling over.