Thursday, July 28, 2016
Quick Tips for Sculpting Custom Shapes with Styrofoam
makezine.com: In the custom drone community, there are fun body modifications made of styrofoam called “foamies.” These are shaped, lightweight bodies that slips over your drone to give it a stylized appearance. We’ve seen everything from imaginative one-off aircraft to crazy recreations of ships from Star Wars.
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So this is really helpful. In theatre we work with so much foam it could fill the whole sun if it was hollow. I never know what to call all the different types of foam, because there’s so many. Like pink, blue, green, thin, thick, and then there’s that weird packaging foam that sticks everywhere. There’s too much of it, but this article just made it so clear. (They left out foam core though.) At my school, were always looking for new ways of working with foam, because each way of gluing and carving just leaves the sculpture not quite right. Also apparently hot gluing foam releases cyanide...? I’ve hot glued foam so much in my theatre days, I should be dead right now. Also, the glue layer before paint seems like it would really help the paint shop, or not because it’s super time-consuming. Cutting foam is a nightmare as well, there are always ribs if you cut wrong, but cutting right takes so much effort and time. So foam is hell, but this article helped.
As a cosplayer, carving foam is one of the best go-to methods of prop building, despite its fragility. One method often used by cosplayers which I have never heard mentioned in theatre is to use spray insulation to create the basic shape of the object, rather than starting from a flat rectangle, or even more inconvenient, layers of flat rectangles. Historically, the way I have treated foam has been to apply layers of model magic (or paperclay) and mod podge, carving details in the clay. In the future, I look forward to using resin or PVA glue to finish foam props, as it will be stronger and will not have the water soluble quality of mod podge.
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