How to Build a Dinosaur, part 1

deinonychus sculpture closeup

Links to the other posts in this series:

Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI


It seems like every year since my thesis year (2008 for those keeping score) I've been able to manage at least one major project.  In 2009 I completed my Bozeman Main Street sketchbook.  In 2010 I finished the San Antonio panoramic sketchbook.  In 2011, I had a solo show at East Central University thanks to my good friend Aaron Hauck, for which I had to build a ton of frames and shadowboxes.  But this year I had to do something pretty far outside my comfort zone.  I built a dinosaur.  Deinonychus, to be precise. 

Obviously, I'd never built a dinosaur.  In fact, I'd never really done any kind of organic sculpting before outside of grade-school ceramics.  So naturally I decided to tackle a life-size, museum-quality dinosaur for my first-ever major sculpture.  So where did the idea come from?  My boss Xavier texted me with a link to a guy named Ken Forbister who carved a T. rex head out of styrofoam.  I think it was more of a "check this out" text, but I immediately responded with a snarky "I can do that."  To Xavier's credit he called my bluff and told me to go for it,  and I started researching immediately.  My initial plan was to see if I could simply have a digital model scaled up using rapid 3D prototyping.  I had sculpted a small T. rex on some digital sculpting software a month or so earlier and had it printed in 3D (at a very small scale) by a company called Shapeways.

Well, it turns out doing something large scale from a digital file is super expensive.  A full-scale T. rex was out of the question, and Xavier wasn't keen on just doing the head.  So we decided I would hand-carve a raptor instead.

Fortunately, it turns out there are a few quality resources on the internet about carving from foam, including one fantastic site from a guy named Rich, who builds just dinosaurs out of foam and fiberglass.  Once I had begun and started posting pics, a few other folks on Flickr had some great advice as well.

After marshaling as many resources as I could find, there were still plenty of technical gaps in my plan, but I had figured some improvising was going to be necessary, so I went ahead and jumped in.

I ordered some supplies from Hot Wire Foam Factory, which is not only a great place to find foam sculpting tools, but a great resource for techniques and strategies.  Finally, it was time to quit stalling so Linda and I went to Lowe's to buy some blue foam insulation.

Using Foam Fusion glue and acetone-free spray adhesive, I glued a small test block together, then carved it into a round, neck-like shape using an orbital sander and some flexible sanding sponges.  It worked pretty well, so I set about gluing a huge stack of foam together to make the torso.
One laminated block of foam

Glue to hold the foam together.

While that was drying I glued together a smaller block that would be the head.
Another block of foam.

I used measurements from John Ostrom's original paper on Deinonychus and skeletal reconstructions from Gregory Paul's Predatory Dinosaurs of the World as my primary resources.
Reference material

Taking shape:
Begin carving.
At some point I found it was easier to carve away big chunks with a bread knife and a snap-blade utility knife full extended.  A lot less messy than sanding, too.
Meanwhile on the big block...
The further I got on the head, the closer to reality the whole project was starting to become.
Carving away
Getting there...
Hey, it's a dinosaur!
Finally I took my Dremel to it and started to gouge in rough details, and that's when the whole thing seemed like it might actually work.
Check out Part II!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How I Draw Spherical Panoramas

A brief history of how I started to "curve" my sketches

Dinosaurs of the recent past