I’m taking a class in 3D design, and we had to come up with a sculpture based on a wireframe that we cover with a bunch of a single item. I’m honestly not sure where I got the final idea, but I originally planned to do a hemisphere and give it cat ears, but then I figured out we were supposed to do something more tangible, so I decided it would be a cat head poking up from some clouds, visible from a little below the nose up. The basic idea was that there would be a cat head surrounded by a flatish space representing clouds (actually thes part is meant to be “bumpy”).
Step 1 was to do the wireframe. I actually did this completely from my head and didn’t draw anything, because it was so clear in my head. I used three different gauges of wire because I had to build a wireframe on a previous project, and the wire I had was two thick. I used the tickets wire, 9 gauge, for the major shapes to provide a really solid framework to attach the other wire to, 12 gauge for most of the rest of the armature, and 18 gauge to strengthen intersection points and provide a little more coverage over gaps.
It’s hard to see what’s going on from the armature, but this is a view of it from the front:
And here it is from the side:
Here’s one more zoomed in a bit on the cat head part, again from the side:
For the first week, we had to do the armature and then run some experiments on our chosen material, trying different ways of modifying it. I decided to go with cotton rounds as my material. The ones I bought have a seam around the outside, so in order to get to the fluffy stuff inside, they had to be cut open. Once I’d opened one, I saw there were different components: the top was a fairly sturdy thin layer, next was a thin textured layer that tore pretty easily, then there was fluffy cotton, and another thin layer below that that the fluff was reasonably well attached to. I decided to do the cat head in intact rounds and the clouds in the bottom layer with the fluff exposed. I would be painting the cat head, so that would be completed before the clouds.
The first step to covering the cat head was to provide a surface to attach the rounds to, so I used duct tape and covered the head with as much detail as possible. Here’s that step:
The next step was to do the rounds. Because I wanted to get finer detail, I cut the rounds into quarters and used those to cover the face, applied to the duct tape with hot glue. I intentionally left the eye areas empty. Then I covered the rest in the full rounds. The ears were tricky, because the rounds are thicker than you might think. Here’s what that looked like:
I painted this gray and then realized that the outside of the head was just too poofy, and it bugged me. So I decided to cut the top, sturdier layer of new rounds off and glue that on top of the surface to smooth it out a bit. I glued those onto the painted head with clear Elmer’s glue and that looked like this:
After this, I repainted the head and then took the top layer of some rounds and dyed them with colored inks for the eyes and nose, and then I glued those on.
After that, it was time to do the clouds. I decided not to put the duct tape down first, as I figured the rounds would attach to the wire pretty well with hot glue. So I proceeded to cut open more rounds to get to the fluffy material, and glued those on. It worked pretty well, though I did run out of glue sticks when I had about a 5 x 5 inch area to finish and it was late enough that everything was closed for the night. So I made my way over to the store the next morning, got a new glue gun that would fit the only glue sticks they had, and finished the clouds. I ended up adding some more fluff at the intersection point between the head and clouds to make the transition less stark. Here are some images of the final product, starting with the front:
Then the view from the top:
And then from the left side:
And the back:
And finally a couple closeups of the head, first from the front:
And the side:
The final sculpture is 18 inches long, 13 wide, and about 5 tall. It could probably be worn like a hat by someone with a small enough head.
This was fun to do even though it didn’t turn out as cool as it was in my head. The eyes ended up too close together once the whole head got bigger by adding the materials (the eyes didn’t get proportionally moved). The ears were really hard to do. I wish I’d thought to do some whiskers, to, with some wire. It wouldn’t have been too difficult, but I didn’t think of it.
