It has been a while so I guess I should post something. All attempts to animate my mouths has been a bust. Something is not connecting in my little brain. I have ordered one of Aardman's animation books in hopes to correct my major oversights. And they are major. One of my continuous frustrations has been my crappy camera. It frustrates me when I work so hard to set up a shot and even though autofocus is turned OFF it still changes the focus. This time it wasn't even focusing on anything. It made the whole picture fuzzy. I have no idea what it was trying to do, but I am ready to take a bat to it's ass. Aaargh.

I am still working on getting a storytelling show going in Eugene. I have contacted several venues, and have been turned down by several venues. There are still couple I haven't heard back from, and I don't expect to now until after the weekend. In a town where there are a lot of independent artists, musicians and others, I am surprised at how many cafes, small stage venues etc do not want to do shows at thier establishments. Or at least my kind of show. Several places have said they just do music. I may have to start widening my search circle. I wanted to have it closer to downtown so it would be easy for people to get to and if people are wandering around downtown looking for something to do we would be nice and convenient. I don't have a car, and quite frankly it is a pain in the ass to get around this town by bus. The people who brag about Eugene's bus system either never use it or have a car as backup. The most convenient place for anyone who takes a bus is downtown. And it doesn't hurt that I live a few blocks from downtown. So I am hoping one of the other venues email me back soon. I can't really afford to pay a lot for a place, so I may not get to be that choosy. We'll see.

I have come to the concluson that my workspace is not optimized enough. It feels crammed and I never have enough space to put everything. My goal for tomorrow is to reorganize my space. That means my whole room. I will rearrange furniture and reorganize my crap. Then i plan to get a couple of stories recorded and up on Soundcloud to share.

I guess that is the boring all. Hopefully more exciting stuff soon.

sigh.

So today my laptop decided it will no longer allow any browsers to work. Damn it. I am posting this from my iPad. Biggest issue with that is I can't post from the web on it, and the app is made for the iPhone, not the iPad, so while I can kind of sorta use it I do not have full usability and there are a lot of glitches. Like the fact it likes to eat my post titles. And I have no control over categories for tags. And pictures are a hit and miss venture. But I attempt anyway cause I have been having fun and I want to try to pass the fun onto you.

So while experimenting with making Sculpey eyes it occured to me that I could also make Sculpy mouths and not have to worry about my sculpting
skills more than once. I could even animate things other than clay puppets with them. So I researched sand found on the interwebs a lip chart for cartooning. It had cartoon mouths in different positions for animating speach. I used it as a pattern, and here is what I came up with:

They were white when I sculpted them. I burned em a bit, just like I did with the eyes. I realy need to learn how to bake Sculpey in a toaster oven without scorching it. Looks red and creepy. Anyway, I was planning on painting them so it doesn't matter. Just means I had to go out and grab white paint for the teeth.

So here is what they look like painted:

Not a great paint job, but not too bad. I did the tongues with red nail polish. I kinda like how they turned out. So now I am playing around with them. I have labeled them a through i. I am writing out sentances from my web series script abd underneath adding the letter of the mouth that should be used with each word. Next I will try shooting them and getting the right timing down. How many frames per word to make it natural? Multiple pics per mouth, or only one? At this point i am not sure, but I plan to find out. If I get anything good I will share it with you.

Wish me luck.

So I procured myself a toaster oven, and determined to make eyes for my puppets. It ,may take me a few tries. Here is my first try. A tad on the toasty side. Who know Sculpey turns red when burned? It is a tad creepy...

Was thinking if I can get the hang of eyes, maybe I can make mouths that way too. Aardman made a separate plastic mouth for each mouth position on each character for Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists! They used a 3D printer to do that. Digression aside, I think that would be a good idea. Make the white Sculpey mouths then paint them to match the character. Then I can add teeth, tongue, both or neither.  I wish I were better at sculpting.

On the way home I stopped at the hobby shop. they had a sale going on, so I thought I would grab some white Sculpey to try to make eyes for this little blighter. Well, it turned out I got glow in the dark instead of white. I suppose it will work anyway. I also don't have an efficient way of hardening the Sculpey. I tried anyway. I used a hair dryer on the highest setting for what felt like an hour. They are haard-ish. So here is a pic of the results:

I put them on pins to harden so they would have holes in the middle. I been doing some reading, and it is easier to animate eyes if they have holes in the pupils. You can use a pin or a pointy movey tool to move them in smaller increments. Then I turned the hairdryer on them. When they would no longer indent when I pushed on them I took them off the pins and then dipped a pin in black paint to try to fill the hole. When they are dry I will make the black dots bigger and try to put a little bit of color in. May be a bit ambitious, as my fine motor skills don't usually like me to work that small. But these will not be final eyes anyway. They are practice. Later this week I will go grab a cheap toaster oven to use to harden the Sculpey. I can make teeth and eyes this way.  Maybe after some practice I will get some good ones.

For ages I have been threatening to try to sculpt my own puppets for my stop mo. Last weekend when I was out with a friend I found some Van Aken clay on sale, so I scooped it up. Then I promptly forgot all about it. well, not forgot as much as was too nervous to try to do anything with it.

So today I was restless and listless and had a really hard time concentrating on anything, so I decided to take a walk. That walk took me past Oregon Art Supply, a very very dangerous place for my bank account. It suffers casualties every time I go in. Today I was good, but I did see they had a cheap extruder and flat roller, which inspired me to bite the bullet (and all sorts of clams) and dig in.

When I got home I dug out my sorry attempt at an armature. Now I am close to being ready to give it a go. Just gotta get up the courage to fail now.
Wish me luck...I'm goin in.

EDIT: OK, after about 2 hours, I barely have a head. I realized I can't use white clay for eyes. They will mush if I try to move them, or the eyelids, or the eyebrows. So I now need to either go to Michaels and look for doll eyes or Sculpy to make n bake them.

Here are the humiliating results so far:

Yeah, I am giving up for the night. I could make hair and build up the body, but I feel like I am saturated at the moment. Tomorrow I gotta go in to work for a little bit, but I may continue this afterwards, given I find enough chocolate and Pepsi and maybe a movie or two to keep me sitting there. When your sculpting skills suck it is easy to lose patience with it. I may not have the temperament for this kind of puppet making. Or the fine motor skills.