“Uncanny Creatures” – Project 1

As our first project in our Theatre Design course at RWCMD, we were given the task to create large paper sculptures. The title of the project was “Uncanny Creatures”. The class was divided into six groups, each group was assigned a sculpture. The six sculptures were: a snail, a frog, a wasp, a raven, a rat and a butterfly. My group had the snail.

To begin with, we made a maquette of the sculpture, in order to understand the structure of the animal, and start getting ideas of how to make it in a bigger scale.

We then began to make construct the “skeleton” of the snail, on the stand that would eventually support the whole sculpture.

The next steps were creating the shell: initially with paper, and then once we had the scale right, out of cardboard.

The cardboard shell was then reinforced (by dividing it in different sections and adding supporting triangles), after being taken down and remade because of how weak the structure had become.

We then filled up the “skeleton” with newspaper to give in the full shape we would then have to colour.

   

A view of our workshop space from above

 

Once the filling was done, colouring began. We ripped up thousands of pieces of coloured paper and carefully collaged them onto the snail, creating the different colours and shades you can see in the following photos.