Cosclay.....tis wonderful stuff

So I am now elbow deep into the Aardman masterclass. I am enjoying myself a ton. It is rough, but I am learning a lot. The whole point is to stretch myself and learn how to be a better animator. That is not comfortable. Growth is rarely comfortable. :) I am still figuring out how to fit in full time work, taking care of a sick doggo, personal stuff and the class. Because I live in a townhouse with no yard and only a small portable washing machine, this has been hard. Cleaning takes forever. Trying to get doggo to where he can go outside when he is having a digestive emergency is hard. It frequently has resulted in the need for deep cleaning. Unfortunately. I am guilty of tossing an area rug instead of trying to clean it. Just cause I was already taking hours to wash bedding (mine) multiple times, clothes, towels, etc. At least I have the portable washer, and don't have to haul it all to a laundromat. I love my doggo. Really I do. This just emphasizes how much I need to find a house with a yard. If there was a yard I could just open the back door for him to run through, instead of trying to attach a leash to an already distressed doggo in time to open the front door and get to the pet area. Add to that servers going down at work necessitating long working hours, and there is not a ton of time, energy or brainpower left to apply to class. I am hoping I can regroup and get on top of everything this week. Doggo seems to have calmed a bit. Servers are running. I still haven't caught up on sleep, but things are loosening up a bit so I can figure out a schedule that will allow me to do everything I need and want to do.

Anyway...

As I don't really have much right now, and I do want to try to be better at keeping up this blog, I thought I would do a deeper dive into my experiments with Cosclay.



Cosclay is a rubberized polymer clay, similar to Sculpy. The biggest difference being that after it has been baked, it is pliable though no longer sculptable.



I first heard about it when the YouTuber Ace of Clay used it on one of his sculptures. He uses it when he has a lot of thin bits that stick out and are in danger of breaking if he uses the regular Sculpy. He demonstrated how much the pieces can bend after baking. He also was successful painting it after baking it.

So it got me thinking...I wonder how hard it would be to use in animation puppets. I did some googling, and really no one has any opinions on it. No one really had a searchable post on them testing it for this purpose. Someone asked in a stop motion forum about it, and was shot down by a lot of people who haven't tried it. that just seemed...inaccurate at best.

But Cosclay, though worth the expense if it works, is kind of spendy to just buy as an experiment. I was waffling about whether or not I should try it...whether it was worth it to me to have clay I may not be able to use.

Then another YouTuber tried it for sculpting. And he loved it. And when he decided to do a set of art boxes, he decided to include a small batch of it in the sculpture box. There were other things included in the sculpture box I wanted, so I decided to get that and if the Cosclay worked I would buy more to use for animation puppets.

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So the box arrived. I was not disappointed. Lots of cool stuff. Jazza did a good job with this box.
Playing with the Cosclay was fun. I started out making a test hand, because that was originally what I was thinking I would do with this stuff. This is a pic of the second hand I did. Because the first hand.....well, let's just say I was a moron. I put it in my toasteroven, like I do with my regular Sculpy. Yeah....flames. Huge giant flaming flames. The hand did not survive. The second hand I also put in the toaster oven, but I put it on a lower temp and watched it closer and it was fine.

This was just a rought hand, to see how well it animated. It is not in proportion to anything. I used 18 gague aluminum wire to rough out fingers and palm, then sculpted the clay over it. Not too difficult. Then I played with animating it. It was really not bad for animating. Here is my test sequence...

So then THAT got me thinking. Can I make a character puppet completely out of Cosclay? I was and am pretty sure a full 12 inch puppet would not work very well. Not a whole Wallace from Wallace and Grommet...though maybe, if the clay is layered on thin. So I decided to start with something simple...an earthworm.

The first iteration turned out being way too thick. While it is bendable, it does not easily stay where I put it. I just bent an 18 gage wire in half, twisted it with my hand crank drill and covered it with cosclay. This one also baked just fine in the toaster oven. Also took paint really well.

So back to the drawingboard. I redesigned the worm to be thinner and longer. And a little bit more realistic, though still cartoonish. The thinner worm worked great! Fully articulated. Stays in the pose I place it in. I even textured it a bit by putting a thread on my handy helper and rolling the worm over it down the length of the worm. That worked way better than I expected as well.

So meet Edna Wormdo. The more I play with her, the more I am warming up to her. I am definitely going to do some videos with her. I even made her a set. Here is the test sequence I did with my ipad...not stabilized to it jumps around a bit.

So...conclusion? I LOVE LOVE LOVE this stuff! In my opinion it works great for stop motion animation puppets, with the caveate that you need to be choosy about where you use it and how thick you build up the clay.

Also...I am currently making replacement hands out of Cosclay for my Wade puppet. My plan is to play around with him and see how well it goes. Have several more twisted wire humanoid puppets in process, and if I can figure out how to make it work well with Wade I will use the same technique with them.