Model-making - Laurence

I’ve finished designing and sewing the clothing for my character. The trousers were a problem to create as the character doesn’t have a pelvis area so the band around the trousers wouldn’t fit without bunching the materials together. To remedy this issue I’ve used individual trouser legs as simple tube shapes that go over each leg, the lack of a top section is hidden behind the coat allowing for this to appear an effective solution.

The coat was challenging to create and the final result appears a bit rough and messy but that somewhat lends to an old well used aesthetic. The yellow high-vis strips were hard to attach to the coat because I attached them after sewing the coat in to shape while I should have sewed them in to the flat material before shaping it to achieve a better effect. As I couldn’t see a way to sew the strips on without showing the thread I instead tried to make it visually interesting by sewing it in to a pattern. 

The edges were also problematic as the cut in the cloth was somewhat messy, I tried to fix this by folding the edges in slightly and sewing a fold, this was mostly quite effective but around the hood area pulled the material up slightly in the right shoulder area. I also placed the left sleeve slightly out of place while sewing it to the material. I found on the next sleeve that the highest point of the sleeve should be sewed in place with the seam of the body to create the T shape you see in the connecting sleeve area. Instead as mine was slightly off-set on that sleeve it created a bit of a misshapen shoulder area.

The shoes were a problem I had been considering for a while and the last thing I tackled, it seemed an impossible task to create shoes that would fit on and off of my character to that scale with any level of efficiency so instead I created the base out of blue-tack to try and add a level of stickiness to the feet to try and encourage my character to stand, and then sewed together a couple of bits of fabric for the outside edge of the foot that would work as the base and then used PVA glue to attach it to the edge of the foot. I then placed a third piece of fabric over the middle of the foot to produce the ‘tongue’ of the shoe before sewing the two outside edges of the shoe together to create the idea of laces. Once that was done I waited for the PVA to dry and then used permanent markers to colour them in to a pattern to imitate the style of canvas shoes. This was quite successful, the toe area appears somewhat messy but without looking too close it doesn’t matter too much and the slightly messy appearance adds a hand-made style that lends an interesting aesthetic.

I painted the face a skin-tone but the holes in the foam still showed through making it hard to achieve a realistic appearance to the skin so instead of producing detailed facial features for the model I think it would be most effective to add it in in post-production.