Monster

Begun, roughly, at some point in late November of 2000 and completed in early January of 2001, Monster was one of the most fun and challenging projects I've ever undertaken.  Half the work in making him was hauling all my equipment up and down the four flights of stairs between my dorm room (where I kept the under-construction beast safe at night) and the kitchen (where I did most of the sloppy work).  I got a break from this over the winter vacation, when I savagely took over the kitchen table at home, much to my mother's chagrin.  But it was all worth it.   Monster is a big, bumpy, horned desert rat-dog-wolf thing who was tons of fun to make (due in part to a great deal of improvisation - I had at one point envisioned a four-limbed creature with giant spikes sticking out of the hips) and came out looking pretty darn cool, if I do say so myself.  I'm going to try and discuss the monster-making process in some degree of detail, but first, some more pictures:

By now, some of you are probably wondering a little about just how monsters like these are made.  I'm happy to inform you that it's actually a pretty low-talent process, and I strongly urge everyone out there to consider keeping a monster-in-progress going on the back porch, or on the kitchen table, or wherever.   It's low-budget, endless fun, and a fantastic conversation starter - especially if you impudently take over a community kitchen like yours truly.  I won't go too much into detail on this - it's more fun to improvise, and I don't want to discourage anybody from purchasing The Simple Screamer, the text I worked from in creating Screamer (though it's worth noting I didn't have access to it for the first half of the Monster project, leading to some structural weirdnesses like extremely skinny legs because I couldn't recall how to do them right).  But here's a general outline of the monster-making process...

Materials: reasonably large stack of newspapers, some old wire coat hangers, clay of some kind, white house paint, some other color of house paint, masking tape, flour, an old white sheet, and some jugs of Elmer's Glue or a substitute Equipment: a good pair of wire cutters, some buckets or jars, paint brushes, neighbors Procedure: 1.  Un-twist the coat hangers so you basically have a big long thing of wire to work with.  Bend and cut them to skeletal shapes you'd like to use.   A big long bit with a bend in it makes a good leg - two big long bits with the same shape can with some cleverness make a reinforced leg of sorts.  I used just one wire for Monster's legs, giving him a rather lean appearance; Screamer used whole coat hangers bent into leg shapes without being unwound, which I find a tad weird in a way, but it makes sense. 2.  Wrap the wire bits in big wads of newspaper and hold the newspaper into the shape you want it with masking tape.  It's at this point that the large-scale shape of your monster is going to be formed, so take some time, work out some idea of what you're going for, consider adding a second piece of wire to the wad for reinforcement, etc. 3. Mix up a paste of flour and water of some reasonable quantity - you'll pick up a sense of how much you'll need after a while - and with the consistency of maybe a thin pancake batter.  You're going to want to get a bunch of little strips of newspaper coated in this stuff and plaster them on the surface of the sculpture.  At this point the monster should still be in a number of different bits (ignore my photos, they're from later in the process when I actually owned a camera); the purpose of the papier-maché layers is to give the thing some solid form, add some durability, and give you the chance to create some interesting detail work not possible with just clumping up dry newspaper.  Knees, knuckles, and anything else bumpy can be fashioned by making little wads of gooey newspaper, pressing them onto the monster, and layering over with an ordinary strip.  Note that this will take a while to dry; for this reason, the papier-maché phase will take a number of days.

Good neighbors provide support for your project.  (Top: Matt Voss was an early collaborator on Monster and offered the use of his room and his wire cutters; Middle: Mattie provided a huge supply of coat hangers; Bottom: Sean F. Kennedy provided the clay)   Bad neighbors are useful too, as they can act as useful visual templates for future monsters.

4.  Meanwhile (that is, on a day when you don't feel like lugging out the flour and newspapers), borrow some clay from the guy across the hall and make a few teeth and eyes as desired.  Ask your clay-wise neighbor for instructions on baking the clay in the oven downstairs, then ignore them; you can get away with just setting the pieces by the heater on an old Moon Pie case and getting them pretty thoroughly dried-out.  Note that teeth should be slightly bigger than your instincts will suggest (they'll be covered up to a large degree by the materials used to attach them) and that horns or any other large protrusions should not be made out of clay; it's too fragile.  Use wire, as if you were making a small arm or something.   The real benefit of the wire/paper/cloth approach (cloth is coming up in a second) is that you get a body that's flexible and durable; clay is neither, and really should be used only where you want to create a reliable smooth surface of a specific shape that will look somewhat bony when painted.  Note that I've also stuck clay bumps on the surface of monsters and then covered them over with loose layers of mache to create a nice bumpy feeling.  Anyway.  On to the key structural work.

5.  The skin of your monster is created by a rather inventive process for which I can take no credit (as with most of this stuff).  Dan Reeder, in The Simple Screamer, calls it "cloth-maché," which seems as logical a term for it as anything else.  The idea here is to cut up your old sheet (white is easiest to paint on) into a lot of strips of varying sizes, as with papier-maché.  Instead of dipping these strips into a flour paste, though, you're going to dip them into Elmer's Glue (or some reasonable facsimile), lightly diluted with water and stirred up a bit.  Squeeze the excess glue out of each strip before you put it on the monster, so you can plaster it on pretty tightly to the skin.  After a while you'll pick up the tricks of this - at first you may have a lot of corners that just won't stay flat on the monster and things of that sort.  A couple of well-dried layers of this cloth process will create a skin for your monster which is fun to touch and also looks pretty good.  To the right we see Monster near the completion of this process - note that the end of the tail and most of the feet are still just papier-maché. A few other notes about the cloth stage...it's pretty much impossible to create thick new structual shapes with the cloth, as you could with the newspaper, but it is possible.   This lets you skip around a little - for example, I went ahead and painted Monster's lower jaw and mouth-roof before going back and permanently affixing the jaw to the body with the cloth.  Also, because cloth has, relatively, a lot more give than the newspaper, you can't stuff wedges of cloth in key places to prevent the wire skeleton from bending out of place; fix this kind of thing early or it'll drive you insane.

Monster, near the middle of Step 5.

Monster, at some point during the staining process.  Note unwanted brown on horns.

me hawking it yet?  Go buy the book), there are a number of photographs of highly elaborate, dozen-color sculptures...these are theoretically within the means of anybody willing to spend a lot of time at the paint counter at Home Depot, so I may attempt a more ambitiously colorful project at some future point. 7.  After painting you can do a lot of optional decorative things, like my last-minute incorporation of marbles into Monstah.  On Monster, the true finale was a stain, in this case created by mixing a small quantity of my dark brown paint with some water.  Soak the surface of the sculpture with this stuff and then wipe it off with your extra cloth very quickly and pretty thoroughly - you only want it to settle in the little gaps and cracks.  This conveniently saves you from having to do a lot of miniscule second and third coats to get all the tiny missed spots, and also adds some depth.  On the other hand, you may have to go back over some areas that got unwanted color on them - in this case, the eyes and the horns.  It's just a fun way of finishing off.

And that's pretty much it.  Sorry if my directions are in places rambling and confusing; I'm not much of a teacher, and I'm still only picking up the fine art of this myself.  Click here for the Amazon page on The Simple Screamer; at around $14, it actually costs less than the supplies you'll need, and offers better directions and a ton of step-by-step photos - as well as a gallery of finished monsters that will really get you thinking about what kind of stuff is possible, and what kind of stuff would look really good in your living room.  Thanks for reading, and feel free to email me with your thoughts, as always.

Screamer *  Bookie * Monstah

Back to the Art Page *  Email Me!