I need to make a very large snake head (let’s say 2 or 3 feet long) for use in a parade.
Assume I have no artistic skills whatsoever. I can’t draw and I sure as hell can’t sculpt. I do have a shed full of tools, for woodworking and welding and electronics and I’m reasonably handy, but I’m only any good with things involving rulers and straight lines and so on. Anything freeform, forgeddaboutit.
Given how large it’s going to be I need it to be reasonably light, so I guess polystyrene, or paper-mache or something like that is going to be best. Or maybe fibreglass.
I suspect I need to start with a form, or mold, but I can’t imagine I would be able to find anything as large as I need, which means I’d need to scale up, which I’m not sure how I’d do.
One possibility might be some sort of computer based solution. Might I find a library of computer models that might have what I need then … I dunno, maybe take that to someone with a CMC machine that could carve using the computer model with polystyrene? Or is that not likely
Your description conjured images of the dragons used in the Chinese New Year Parades in San Francisco that I’ve seen. Searching on that might help you. Good luck.
I’d vote for paper mache. It’s light, cheap, easy to work, and if you mess up it’s pretty easy to correct. If you want it to be really light, place it on a chicken wire form.
I’ll second paper mache. Super easy to make, lightweight, and paint-able. You could use almost anything as a mold - chickenwire, a strangely shaped bowl, a balloon, carved styrofoam, etc, etc. Balloons work particularly well as you can just pop them when it dries.
+1 for paper mache. Foam is more difficult to scupt than you think. If you do have a bandsaw and some skill you can cut a set of flat pieces to glue together, and then with a lot of sanding you might get something you can use. With paper mache you have a material you can just keep shaping and adding to until you’re satisifed.
I’ve built floats before. I was able to build (with the help of a college sorority) a pretty cool dragon with no experience at all. Chicken wire and paper mâché is really easy to work with for the beginner. It’s also light. BTW, I cut out and stapled “scales” onto the finished body. Worked out well.
Snake heads are a fairly simple geometric shape. They have a tapered box shape, with a flat nose, flat head, flat jaw, but tapering on all sides i.e. four trapezoids* and a rectangle nose. The eyes have a peaked eyebrow ridge. The upper lip has a slight hare-lip to it.
Thanks, sounds like paper mache might be the go, though I’m still pretty doubtful about my artistic abilities, in terms of making something that looks (even vaguely) like a snake.
1 Work small at first, and get it worked out before you do the big one. I’d start out in play dough or clay until you have the shape worked out. If I have a problem with my visual art, it’s that I usually don’t do much pre-work. It works out better when I do pre-work.
2 It’s not really that hard. A good place to start is to look at other’s work to help you out. I’d get a toy snake, and work on reproducing its head. Once I was happy with my small one, I’d start on the large one. GuanoLad’s reducing the shape to geometric forms is a great place to start. here’s an image of several venomous snake heads sketched geometrically, which might get you started thinking about which snake you want to sculpt.
