More Trials And Tribulations of Skinning Weird Blue Creatures with Creepy Faces

I put silicone on the second Creature, trying to colour it with the same shade of blue as Aluki's coat in order to show that the Creature represents her. I put a layer of reasonably opaque baby blue silicone over the foam, then after that dried I added a layer of fairly translucent, slightly brighter blue, before adding a layer of extremely translucent black silicone. It was all going well until I got heavy handed with the black. I thought it would be a good idea to create cracks in the skin, so I pierced the silicone with a cocktail stick, drawing cracked lines through the skin. I then tried to put black silicone in the cracks. As you can see in the first photo, the crack did look pretty cool on his stomach. Buuuuuuuut the black smudged on the Creature and as I made more cracks, the Creature slowly got darker and darker as the black smudged about. Stupid oil paint. 

Once I realised this I compared the Creature to the other Creature and the skin tone was too similar, I needed them to be really different so that the audience gets that there are two different Creatures. It was really annoying as I thought the skin did look really good, it had a nice rock like texture going on. But I had to make the hard, horrible decision to cut all the silicone skin off and start again. To add to my annoyance, the Creature's leg randomly decided to come apart at this point...... literally no idea what happened there, on inspecting the joint I found that the epoxy glue had literally just come unstuck, the wire hadn't snapped or anything. You can see the legless, too dark Creature in the photo below.

I fixed the leg and reskinned the Creature, repeating the steps apart from the last one with the black cracks. The colour is so much better now, but the texture is not quite as good, as it came out smoother. The Creature does have good mobility, it's thin enough that the silicone does not put up too much resistance when bent.

Little People

These are my miniatures of Aluki and Anik which will be used for shots where they need to appear in the distance. 

Creature Number 2

The armature for the Creature that represents Aluki's presence in Anik's mind: 

Polar Bear Creature Puppet

I wrapped strips of face cloth around the body to achieve a furry look and then painted them with acrylic ink. I remade the head, still using foam, but this time I carved it in two layers, the base and then the nose layer, before glueing them together. I had some trouble with this puppet as first time round I made up the bulk of the body with foam, before wrapping the cloth round. But this made the puppet to stiff, there was too much foam and cloth so the wire armature was not strong enough to hold its position when moved, it would just spring back to its default position. obviously this is no good for animation. So I had a brain wave and slit open the stomach, gouged out the the foam in the middle, leaving a hollow stomach, then glued the sides back up. I repeated this for all the legs. It was a very long process as the foam proved impossible to remove as it had glued so stiffly. But I got there eventually and the puppet no longer hd so  uch resistance and was able to be animated.

Polar Bear Armature

My first quadruped armature.....
I thought all four legged things had the back leg structure of a dog but when I looked at some polar bear skeletons it became apparent their back legs have the same bone structure as the front ones. I added in some shoulder blades to help give the emphasis of heavy ,powerful legs. This armature was a little harder to put together than a bipedal one, but was strangely more satisfying to make.
I tried to make the face base out of foam but it did not really work as the foam was quite difficult to carve so I need to figure something else out.

Final Polar Bear Design

I finalised the polar bear design, when I make the face on the puppet it will come out better than in my drawing (hopefully) as my drawing is very flat face wise, so you can't really tell what I was trying to do with the eyes. When I make the polar bear puppet in its full form it will have the face of the Creature, but since I need the polar bear to swim before its face transforms, I will make the polar bear with its natural face only have half a body. I will only make the back, neck and head of the puppet, giving the illusion the rest of its body is underwater.

Caribou Character Development

Here is some early development work for the caribou character.

Polar Bear Character Development

Here is my development work for the polar bear. I made it quite abstract to start with, using the Inuit art as inspiration, but then decided it didn't look enough like a polar bear, so I had a redesign. It needs further work, I want it to have a slightly chiselled, carved sculpture look to it, if possible.

Bird Design Development

Here are some bird designs for the ones that stare at Aluki and transform into the Creature. So they need to be very starey. I'm basing them on the Inuit owl carving shown below.

I tried carving a bird out of balsa wood, but it was very hard to even get this crude shape, so I do not think balsa is a suitable material to make the puppets out of. It does have a cool texture though. Shame.