Post #709140 by Joshua Bell on Sat, Feb 22, 2014 9:57 PM

A few days after returning from "the DL" the Pele statue I'd had shipped arrived by mail. She needed a friend, so I was staring at the empty cardboard box and packing paper, and inspiration struck.

How I made it:

I printed out reference photos of the Tiki Room Drummer God on 8.5x11" paper, cut out a side view, and traced it onto multiple sheets of cardboard. I cut the cardboard out, stacked the layers together, trimmed down the neck and waist (etc), then taped them together. I coated it with papier-mâché - flour and water mixed to the consistency of heavy cream, and used strips of the brown packing paper. Then set it in the sun to dry:

It looked a little rough, but the prototype was supposed to appear carved from wood, so I figured that was okay. I learned on Wikipedia that you can sand papier-mâché so I did a little smoothing.

Base coat of brown ("burnt umber") acrylic paint:

I painted the details on both sides then added cracks:

The colors looked too bright - my son made a quip about hot dogs. :(

I went back in and weathered it: painted over the details with brown then immediately wiped it off.

I thought this looked acceptable. I used a plastic food storage tub as the drum, lined the inside with aluminum foil, used parchment paper as a diffuser for the drum skin, and stuck in a flickering LED tea light.

He's obviously (and intentionally) much smaller than the drummers in the ETR (or the copies that now go for terrifically high prices). He'll end up on a high shelf, and we can call it "forced perspective". Here he is with a common household object for scale:

[ Edited by: Joshua Bell 2014-02-22 22:03 ]

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[ Edited by: joshua bell 2014-09-04 21:08 ]