After baking the mouths for the female bird and seeing it as a success, I decided to go ahead and make the mouths for the sheep. I wanted the lip 'liner' to be the same as the skin tone, so I kept it a peach colour, with white teeth and a brown base. Obviously I didn't buy brown fimo clay, so I did what I did last time and decided to paint it/colour it in the desired colour, this being brown, as I thought black would be too harsh.
I also made the mouths for the sheep a bit smaller, because I had made plasticine versions of them, and they were too big and too overwhelming on the models face. Therefore I made sure to use my red mouths as reference, but minimise their scale slightly, so that they would look more suitable to fit.
Because the mouths were smaller, this meant that the process of making the teeth in particular was even more finicky. I had to take longer to get the teeth to look precise, however I really enjoyed this process because I found it satisfying seeing the mouth form come to life. At this point I had made 24 mouth shapes, but I made some extras because there are four/five other sheep in our scene at a time. Though they are not all talking simultaneously, I thought that it would be nice to have them move their mouths a bit in consideration/agreement, or if anything, at least have closed mouths prepared for animation.
I baked the mouths again, at 100 degrees Celsius for a bit less this time, around 13 minutes, as opposed to 15, because I read that with lighter colours you need less time, which is true because on my previous set, there was a tooth with a crack in it! So I think I learnt from my mistakes and was more wary this time around.
I placed some mouths on the models to see if they fit and I am quite happy with them. I don't love them as much as the bird mouths, but I think once they start to move and they begin to animate, they really will look more enjoyable and entertaining. I am enjoying this process, especially because I don't know what to expect every time I try something new.
Then it came to considering the coat. Because we already had a shape and size for our sheep bodies, and they we weren't planning on moving them, I thought that if I baked individual swirls and stuck them onto the coat, this would prevent it from moving, and from the pattern from being flattened. I originally wanted to place the swirls onto the plasticine and then bake it, but then I thought about putting plasticine in the oven and if this was safe. It definitely is not, nor is it to put foam in there or any other type of material that could be set on fire, that is not specifically made to be heated. Therefore this was the only other option that I could think of from our feedback that would be efficient, and aesthetically pleasing.
This probably took me the longest our of all the modelling jobs, because I had to repeat making the swirls and then continue sticking them onto the sheep bodies. That is not to say that I don't like the result because I really do, and now I feel that our models are much more durable as we can squeeze them and they won't be ruined. It also allows us to move the head and ears as well without being too careful with the bodies!
I then thought about eyes, since this was another part that we were advised to change. There were a few options we could take, the first being buying animation eye type beads for our models. Hayley and I looked into this and found that they were quite expensive and a bit too realistic for our liking. Sara also advised just plane beads like you can get for making bracelets, but I went to the Range and could not find any that were small enough for our model size. Therefore I decided to think further.
I decided to make the eye ball out of polymer clay and then bake it so the overall size and shape of the eye would not move. I then made smaller balls of clay for the pupils and was going to paint them. However I realised once I took them out of the oven, that I wasn't sure how I was going to make them stick to the eye ball because I didn't want to glue them together as we wanted them to move around, therefore there was no way for them to connect to each other. I then remembered that I have black plasticine and that this would work well for moving around as the pupil, because it is quite sticky and easy to move with a toothpick.
In the top two images above, these were the models with the eyes that were all plasticine, and the lower two images, are with baked eye balls, and plasticine pupils. I think these look much more realistic and give us more versatility. We can manipulate the plasticine to make the pupils smaller, as if they were in surprise or even larger, without being restricted by the baked clay, but still having a strong foundation to work from.
Therefore this is what I have so far for our sheep models. I feel like I have taken feedback from both my peers and teachers seriously in order to improve the look and structure of our models.
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