The Creative Act

Mache Mardis!
Imagine an accent there, so that it’s Mach-EH Mar-dees.
So, my puppet pal and I have conspired to turn Tuesdays (the titular Mardi) into Paper Mache (ditto, for Mache. I.E. the titular Mache. Geez, keep up) Tuesdays. Or Mardi Mache. Geez, keep up.
This is/was mostly an experiment in the medium, to see if we can make puppet features (heads, mostly, but why not hands, feet and torsos?) that are, at once, light, durable and reproducible on the cheap.

We have tried 2 recipes.  The first was based on egg carton cardboard.  It’s a rougher paper, and ideally the wax in board helps with stiffness and cohesion.  Not quite trusting that we added assloads of white glue.  The results were quite interesting.

EDIT
For the actual recipe, http://home.eol.ca/~props/recipes.html has the TP recipe (as Recipe #2, which worked for me). Note that there’s two recipes you’ll be using. One is for the paper, one is for the paste.
Production 2 -Toilet Paper and Flour paste

Actually, this was production 2, not 1 because  We had a much more tentative try the week before with the egg carton recipe.  But I’ll save that for later.

30m into production process 2.

Mostly, the irritating part was ripping TP for …

Now, one hour in. Not much more done, eh?

God, who's stupid idea was it to spend 1.5 hours ripping up TP?

… an Effing hour and a half.  This is a good thing to do with a friend, because we chatted, bitched and mouthed off during this period of time.

See how much you can rip in an hour, then try to beat that!

Not a game.

So, we then had to spend 2 hours cooking it.

Cooking the mix. The big pot is TP, the smaller is flour paste.

So, we cooked it all up, and it was 10 pm.  Asa left, I refrigerated the whole effing mess, and next week we continued.

2 weeks(?) later, my head, sanded

2 weeks later, Asa's head

2 weeks later, my alternate head

Tiki Tuku lives! He's also sanded.

So, my first head we’ll call Goofus.  The mixture, as you can see in the unsanded pics is very pebbly, and clumped quite a bit in the application.  It was also quite wet.  Given the chance again I’d drain off much more water.

But, things we learned here.  #1- use a base structure, usually a ball of Al~foil but in head #2 (wood eyes) I used a sanding sponge, which is why he’s such a square head (like his Daddy!)  He dried fast, but let’s look at the back of his head…

Inside of alternate head

See where the eyes are, all the dark splotches?  That’s mould, friends!  Flour paste has this as a problem.  Adding clove oil is supposed to help, and maybe it did, but it didn’t vanquish our fungal foes (they may not be fungal, but Alliteration Allows Anything).

Asa’s head just used a clump of Aluminum foil inside as a base.  That was pretty solid, and was used effectively the week before as well.  All pieces showed a curious red splotching that may have been mould, may have been ink run-off from the loose leaf we were working on.

Verdict – pebbling is bad, m’kay?  Sanding helped, but then the piece gets all fuzzy.  That’s a fun effect, and means you can have fuzzy solid pieces, which make good gifts.  However, when combined with the occasional solid area, painting it is a real bitch.  Case in point:

Tiki Tuku, painted with black on the right, light grey on the right

See how rough it is on the right side?  Now, I may have had more luck with a non-water based paint, and with a paint brush instead of a q-tip, s’true.  But still, my point stands, different textures accept paint differently, which is not usually good.

Sanding also makes a huge mess.  The Dremel (Hallelujah!) makes this work fast, but making a mess fast too.

In sum, pebbling = rough and fuzzy, hard to paint but possibly useful if that’s what you want.

Week 3 -Egg cartons!

So recipe 2 (recipe 1 really, but ignore all that) involves egg cartons and white glue.  We’d tried it 3 or 4 weeks previous, were reasonably happy with the results.  It pebbled, but not crazily, and was SUPER tough.  Hard as a soft wood, and light!  Fabulous.  So we gave it another go.  We’re helped immensely by having a bunch of breakfast places nearby.  Go for the falafel and eggs, stay for the 20 egg crates!

I’ll skip the production process – This time I did it all (mostly, really) the night before.  At least the ripping.  Then the day of I spent an hour blending the cardboard while Asa made dinner.   We didn’t cook it for 2 hours, so we were able to make stuff right away.

Because everytime you make mache, you must make a volcano

Yeah, not a puppet, but just imagine the sheltered cove, with a peaceful village of innocents, and then the rumbling…

Also, note the level of pebbling.  I was trying for none in the idyllic cove, and not too concerned about the volcano, etc.

He's Buddha, in his fatter, laughinger incarnation

So, fat buddha I’m hoping to turn into an actual puppet eventually for a puppet play yet to be written (he he… Awkward).  He’s been mostly sanded, huge mess again, but you can see inside the mouth the pebbling isn’t too bad, whatever Asa said.  His core is a ball of Al~ Foil.

The thin, long faced guy has been well sanded.  He’s Lance Banner, captain of Zee’s Moon patrol.  Maybe a puppet, but maybe just a head to hang.  Look at that hair!  His eyes make him look like a dick, but he’s actually a great, rugged do-gooder.

Oh, and an example of the first week’s product, with TP just applied to the outside of the still-wet head.

Cardboard recipe, with TP added overtop the still-wet head

It’s a dragon head, because I’m a nerd.  So fuck you.

It came out pretty neat, I think.  Again, Al Foil ball core, with the crap all over the place.  Pebbling worked out okay.  Asa did an interesting thing with a human shape head.  He sanded the TP off all of it except the hair area, making a grey faced white haired dude.  Pretty neat.

So, in my mind, assuming we can get past the fact that the Cardboard recipe is darker, it’s the better recipe.  It’s faster, a little harder, and I like the results better.  Pebbling ain’t so bad, and fuzziness after sanding is less.

EDIT
This may not have been clear before: I’ve been trying to avoid horribly toxic things in the production process, which includes bleach. Bleach would likely have whitened quite well, but it’s a horrible, horrible thing. Call me crazy, but I like having the option of just getting my hands into the mess and going to town, rather than having to wear rubber gloves because skin isn’t a good enough barrier.
Asa is all for trying crazy resins and shit but I don’t exactly have an industrial grade ventilator around. Do you?