Before the first session we had to bring in a design of the character we wanted to create, our character had to be about the size of a piece of A4 paper and be standing face on with their arms outstretched. For my character I drew Garfield's Brother. I had trouble coming up with an idea of what character to draw for my model. I knew it had to have a relatively simple design as it was going to be made out of plasticine.
I decided on creating a new character that would be Garfield's brother so it was like I wasn't ripping off the Garfield character and simply copying it, instead I was kind of making my own version of Garfield with Garfield's brother who I portrayed as a drug addict.
The first day of model making was assembling the wire armature.
(Example of a wire armature)
Assembling the wire armature was quite a difficult process, it was basically like building the skeleton for our character so if this stage didn't work we would not be able to proceed, furthermore if the armature didn't look right our entire model would not look right. The wire we used was very bendy but also very tough and I was amazed at how strong our wire armature was once we had finished putting it together.
The next step was to put a clay mould around the various joints (as you can see in the right half of the above image). This was important because the plasticine would not be able to stick to the armature without it.
Once that was done it was time for the third step which was to apply plasticine to the armature. This was by far the most enjoyable of the tasks because it allowed me the chance to actually mould the character's likeness into the plasticine.
Above is my model with plasticine moulded onto the wire armature. Overall I was very happy with the model thus far. I felt like I had created a likeness to the original Garfield while having also created my own thing. One concern I did have at this point was that he would be too top heavy. If you look at Garfield as a character, he has got a very large head which works fine in a comic. But it did mean when it came to moulding him as an actual plasticine model the weight of plasticine did way him down to the point I had to use a pencil to stand him up. As you can see his eyes are a different colour. this is because we had to mould eyes separate as in the final thing the eyes are going to be separate so we can move them around.
The next step was to place our plasticine into a casing made entirely of clay. Almost like placing our model in a clay box. One issue with my model was that because Garfield's Brother's head was so large I had to use a lot of clay in order to build a border high enough to go above his head and it had to be higher than his head. The reason for this was because in the next step we had to fill the box with runny plaster.
We only had a limited time to do this before the plaster hardened so we basically had to get it right first time meaning the walls of the box had to be air tight so no liquid could escape. Once I had completely filled the box with plaster I had to wait for the plaster to set which was done in a matter of minutes.
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