Made by Mike Leiner

Should have included the sculpture with the head I recently sent a photo of. Just trying to to use up various junk pieces I have laying around.

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The post Fisherman first appeared on Ultimate Paper Mache and is written by Jonni Good.

Made by Gail Swanson

Didn’t take to long to make. The T-rex was hard . ALMOST threw him away.

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The post Frog first appeared on Ultimate Paper Mache and is written by Jonni Good.

Made by George Morrison

This was my first ever project using paper mache clay, and many thanks to Jonni for sharing her recipe and making this site in general! I’ve got a lot of things I want to make/try next!

I made this using cardboard, foam tubes, copper wire, aluminum foil, and of course paper mache clay! In order to have any chance of getting the correct progression of suction cup sizes from base to tip, I designed and 3D printed over 1500 suction cups and hot glued them to the arms. I modeled the head separately from the body and then attached it later. This made it easier to place the head on a lazy Susan and get the shape and details right.

I used a natural sponge and some paper mache clay with reduced paper content to dab on to make the skin texture. I used clear cabochons for the eyes and printed an image of a real octopus eye to glue to the backs of the cabochons.

Painted with acrylic paint and some airbrushing for color breakup. I had masked the eyes with Vallejo liquid mask to keep them pristine until after painting; that worked really well and was easy to remove when I was ready. I used DecoArt triple thick gloss glaze to give the sculpture a wet a slimy look. I hope you enjoy it!

PS: My apartment is not gonna be happy when they see the size of the hook I drilled into their wall to support this monster, but I guess I’ll deal with that another day.

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The post Giant Pacific Octopus first appeared on Ultimate Paper Mache and is written by Jonni Good.

Made by Kit Albern

In a lot of eastern cultures, they say there’s a rabbit in the moon instead of a man in the moon. When I bought this pattern I was initially thinking I’d make a jackelope, but then I began to wonder what a moon rabbit would look like. So, I course-corrected and decided I’d try to create my interpretation of the mythical moon rabbit.

While I did cover her in faux fur, her interior is paper mache.

The first problem I ran into is that I didn’t have any cereal box cardboard. At the time I just used posterboard. (This later came to bite me in the butt.) Putting the pieces together was actually a lot of fun, and I enjoyed it quite a bit!

But then came the second problem; I had gotten a bit too far along on the head when I remembered I wanted to add glass eyes.

I hand-painted these eyes with little crescent moons on them. I wanted them to be dark, mysterious, and glittery. I use nail polish to paint on the back of glass cabochons since I think the shimmery enamel looks more beautiful than any acrylic paint.

Pouring hot glue into the head to stick the eyes in place was NOT working; I had gotten too far on the head, so the angle was all wrong, and the hold on the eyes was very weak. If you squeezed the head wrong, they’d pop loose. I was also beginning to come to terms with the fact that the poster board wasn’t as thick as I would’ve liked.

Then I remembered: I had expanding spray foam!!

It took a lot of cleaning out the can, but I finally got a good layer of spray foam (you can find it as “Great Stuff” or other brands) inside of her. Like magic, it filled up the cavity, holding the eyes in place and making the head lightweight but solid.

Finally, it was time for paper mache!

I used brown paper bags. I went with the uncooked flour and water recipe; I knew I’d end up covering her in fur. I didn’t need the interior to be pretty: I just needed it to be strong. It took about four sessions over the course of two days, which was much better time than I’ve had for past paper mache projects. I was surprised at how sturdy she is. Her ears are perfectly stiff!

Once the paper mache was dry, I applied a layer of blue tissue paper as a decoupage to her ears, and painted that with darker blues, blacks, and purples. I used a paintbrush with watered down white paint to flick stars onto her ears to create some quick galaxies. Then, I took a white paint pen and drew on some constellations. There’s Cancer, Aries, and Leo on her left ear, and the Big and Little Dippers on her right.

After that, I painted the area around her eyes black and applies some fine flocking powder (Folk Art’s “Velvet crush”).

Then came the trickiest part; furring the head and ears. To get a perfect fit, I actually printed off the ear pattern again and cut it out, then sewed the darts together to create a perfectly sized and shaped piece that I could glue onto the back of the ears. It fit like a glove! I was a bit more carefree for the face; I eyeballed symmetrical pieces of fur and glued them on. I used an electric trimmer to shorten the fur around her muzzle, just a bit.

After that I just had fun with her; I put some aluminum rings on her ears, painted the fur black near her muzzle, and glued a dichroic glass gem onto her forehead.

A HUGE thank you to Jonni for the pattern; I wouldn’t have been brave enough to even attempt her without the template. I’m planning on selling this beauty, so wish her well as she goes to bring luck into a new home!

If you want to learn how to paint beautiful glass eyes like these, I highly recommend Back to Earth Creations on youtube; she makes gorgeous dragon eyes, which is what I referenced when making the moon rabbit’s crescent eyes.

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The post The Moon Rabbit first appeared on Ultimate Paper Mache and is written by Jonni Good.

Made by Jill Strzinek

This was made for a Breast Cancer Walk. I was totally finished when I realized I gave a female lion a mane.

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The post Pink Lioness first appeared on Ultimate Paper Mache and is written by Jonni Good.

Made by Julie Park

This is my paper mache clay sculpture based on my first pony. A lifetime ago.
A beginner with this medium but there is something special about making
Your own paper clay.

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The post My first pony first appeared on Ultimate Paper Mache and is written by Jonni Good.

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New Paper Mache Dragon Tutorial by Cindy Williams

Well, I did it again. Enough time has passed and I had to make another full-bodied paper mache dragon. So, I checked out some images online for ideas, made some measurements for where it would hang on the ceiling, and away I went.

I always chuckle at the first picture:

I hope folks get a kick out of how crude and simple these projects start. After one session, the mighty red dragon is just a wad of masking tape, crumpled plastic grocery bags, and a wooden dowel sunk into the chest, which will serve as the ceiling attachment point later.

A note on using grocery bags vs newspaper for the armature. I don’t know about you, but it’s harder to come by newspaper these days. Plastic grocery bags, however, are everywhere. Pop into your local grocery store and I bet they have a big recycling bin of them out front. Help yourself! I’m fairly convinced the plastic is stronger than paper, and I especially like plastic for wrapping around wire, which I used in the tail, legs, toes, and wings.

Here is the dragon body taking form after quite a few hours of work:

At this point, it’s just grocery bags, tape and wire. For now, the dragon is one piece, but I would do the wings and head separately. It’s just easier to paper mache some parts when they aren’t attached.

This picture shows plastic bags wrapped around wire to create the wing fingers:

And here we have one wing ready to paper mache and one nearly ready:

Now onto the head. I used the same method of crumpled grocery bags and tape to create the structure:

I also like using cardboard to help create certain shapes like the big horns, nose horn and sharp ridge running down the snout. Cardboard can help serve as a template like with the horns, or just help create a sharper edge, like with the snout. I also used a bit of wire to map out the lower jaw.

Once the head was to form, I began to apply paper mache:

To paper mache, I use a simple mixture of white flour, Elmer’s white glue and water. I never measure, just mix to consistency. I use ripped up pieces of blue shop towel for the paper mache “skin,” which is why the dragon looks blue. Shop towels, in my opinion, are far superior to newspaper in strength and holding more details when applied over the armature. Generally, if something needs to be load bearing or strong, I will apply up to 4 layers of shop tower paper mache, usually doing two layers at once, letting it dry, then coming back and adding two more. For the head, which is not load bearing, I used just one layer.

Once the head and jaw were paper mached, I sculpted teeth and eyebrow ridges out of Super Sculpy oven bake clay, and glued them into place:

The clay around the eye is a two-part epoxy Magic Sculpt clay, which dries and hardens in place. The glass eyes I got on Etsy.

Now for scales!

I doubled up pieces of shop towel using rubber cement, then carefully marked out face scales on the doubled up sheet. Once dry, I cut out the scales and paper mached them onto the face. You can see the way I labeled the scales to keep them in the right spot.

Before attaching the head, I painted the horns, mouth, and teeth:

Think ahead if you’re doing a big piece on how you will be able to rotate and access the sculpture. Once the strategic painting was done, I attached the head and lower jaw. This was tricky, as I made some estimates about how the dragon would hang on the ceiling and at what angle the head needed to be.

To attach the head, I used hot glue, masking tape and paper mache:

Once the head was on, I realized my proportions were off. Oops.

No worries, it’s just plastic and tape:

I flipped the dragon over and beefed up the chest, legs, and tail. You can cut off and reattach limbs as well as add more plastic bag, tape and paper mache onto already paper mached surfaces, so don’t worry if you mess something up!

With the proportions fixed, I flipped the beast over again and started to attach the wings:

With the wings propped up, I used wire, tape, and plastic bags to connect the wings onto the dowels in the arms.

The step ladder and office chair were a great help holding the wings in place as I eyed things for symmetry:

Now that the wings were attached, I used a strand of wire to run between the wing fingers and map out the shape of the wing membrane:

Using an old bed sheet dipped in straight white glue, I draped the gluey sheet in place over the wire and left it to dry overnight:

On a side note, I used an old t shirt sheet. I would never do that again, as it absorbed so much glue, then later on absorbed a ton of primer and paint. Pro tip – use slicker, less cottony sheets.

With the wings dried, I flipped the dragon back on its belly to finish up a few last paper mache details around the wings and toes:

Then I made a painting plan:

This sculpture was now 7’ wide and weighed close to 35 pounds. I had to do the painting in two stages, first with the dragon on its back, then a last final flip onto its stomach. I got the dragon into place on its back, and primed the whole underside in white gesso.

Another side note – look carefully at the primed dragon. See all those little scales everywhere? Even though adding all these scales literally took me an entire audio book’s time, I don’t have any pictures from this stage. I cut hundreds of doubled up scales out of shop towel, dipped them in paper mache, then carefully applied each one. Same idea for the larger belly and tail scales. It adds a neat texture.

Painting time!

My painting strategy is to pick several colors for each dragon part, and apply starting light to dark. I like to wipe areas to create a fade/shadow effect, which is easily seen in the wings. This part took a very, very long time, as painting always does.

Once everything I could access with the dragon on its back was painted, I applied a sealer coat and flipped it over.

At this stage, I hit pause on the painting and started creating back plates out of a cardboard box:

Here you can see me eyeballing how the back plates sit on the neck.

The next step was to paper mache each plate separately, let dry, then hot glue them onto the dragon:

Each plate got spikes made out of cardboard:

Then each spike was paper mached separately, left to dry, then hot glued back in place.

Then back to painting again! My painting plan had accounted for the fact that once I made the back plates with spikes, I could never again lay the dragon on its back. And everything worked to plan.

The plates themselves were really fun to paint, and I used a fluorescent red to really make them pop:

I followed the same color scheme as on the underside, and the end was in sight:

Then before I knew or could believe it, my 2 year long project was hanging from the ceiling like it had always been there. I sunk a heavy-duty eye screw into the top of the chest dowel and used a bit of chain to attach it to another heavy-duty eye screw in the ceiling. The I made a custom p cord strap to loop around the tail, and attached that with another chain to the ceiling.

And here it is, my big red dragon, smiling down from above:

Thanks to anyone who read through this, and I hope it brings inspiration to you. Paper mache is such an accessible, cheap, yet durable and versatile way to make sculptures. It’s a super strong medium, and once you get a sense of the basics, I honestly think the sky is the limit for what you want to make. -Cindy

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The post Dragon #2 by Cindy Williams first appeared on Ultimate Paper Mache and is written by Jonni Good.

Made by Mike Leiner

Going onto a wall sculpture, used the homemade glue recipe.
@mi1943ke

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The post Fisherman first appeared on Ultimate Paper Mache and is written by Jonni Good.

Made by Ralene Goff

I wanted to make a Sven head piece for a production of Frozen Kids. I used your camel pattern and built up the neck and added antlers, yarn, and fake fur. I am pretty excited about how he turned out! The kids are going to love him!

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The post Sven for Frozen Kids first appeared on Ultimate Paper Mache and is written by Jonni Good.

Made by Mike Leiner

Ready for paint, going on top of sculpture wall piece. Used homemade glue recipe.
@mi1943ke

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The post Fisherman first appeared on Ultimate Paper Mache and is written by Jonni Good.