Paper mache Horse making!

Hi everyone!

Now that I've introduced you to my other site - myroyaldols.wix.com/myroyaldolls - today's post will be about horse making as I'm planning to make an equestrian portrait of a very special king.

The portrayed this time will be King D. Sebastião. For many reasons, for me, he is the Golden Boy of Portuguese History so I want to represent him whilst empowered by its earthly and divine "right" to rule, thus mounted on a horse symbol of power and strength.

 For the doll I will use a head from a sketched doll I tried somewhile ago, but wont go further before the horse is finished.

Horse wise I had made one some months ago in order to make another equestrian portrait doll (of D. João VI inspired on the famous paiting by Domingos Sequeira) but ...
The body was finished and was waiting for legs and some other features.
In the meantime it was hanging here and there for far too long until I thought about making a cast of it in order to be able to make more more and more!

Horses have been always an adventure. The first one I made was .. too long to remember the materials actually, I do remember that the dolls though were made out of a structure of wire wrapped on foam and then dressed according to its epoch. In his case, Portuguese King D. Afonso V and his horse have armors made out of coke cola cans which, with time, all rusted and after some years (and because one of the horse's legs was broken (and I was fed up with the whole thing) putted it on the garbage. This sculpture was probably from 2009 or 2010...

The second horse I made was much later, last year in fact! Structure wise was made as I made the one I'll be showing you soon, the "skin" was papercrete (paper + concrete) and rearranged with toilet paper (the figure was done according the same procedures as I told you a post ago).
It portrays Portuguese King D. João IV (wish I'd have better photographer skills!)

 Now the recent one.
The only photo I have of it it was taken after demolding the halves

 So my horse "recipe" would be to use 2 balls for the chest and the dérriere + 2 cilinders of cardbox to link both and the neck and the head was a "modeled" toilet paper roll.
This one is covered with my recipe of paper clay (search its post on this blog!)

The rest was wrapping both halves in tin foil and spray the expandable foam on top! Voilá!


















Now the casts were ready, time for the dificult part.
For the dificult part I decided to soak some sheets of paper and "smear" them inside, then, whilst still wet, gave some coats of little strips of paper soaked in glue. It worked!!!

The result that came out from the casts looked clumsy not to say shitty but with patience I was able to reassemble all and even glue both halves in order to obtain a... horse!

As I want a very specific pose, even after the horse was assembled fine, I made some cuts in order to define positions. I want him to stand and whilst working on this I've covered some bits of paper clay and this is how far things are at the moment

 Thanks for visiting!