- You can actually pin this right on your puppet.
And you know where your lines are,
your mouth lines and everything else.
And then I'll use usually these disappearing ink markers,
these little blue ones.
These disappear with water.
It's not really important whether they're disappearing ink
or not, you just don't want anything
that's gonna soak through unto your puppet.
And then I wanna draw my mustache.
So say for him, we wanna draw something like this.
Not a full handlebar, but just something kinda fun.
So then what we'll do is we'll take this off,
and lay it down, either use scissors
or a blade.
Yep.
So, like that.
Now what I do, is I usually will try to use the light
and hold this up to the light to line it up as best I can,
and then fold it.
So that way I'm evening my pattern out.
'Cause, you know you free hand things,
it's not always great.
The good thing is, though, you'll also see
how inconsistent your puppet is.
If your puppet's really not centered well,
then you can make that adjustment as well on your pattern.
I'm gonna use a sharp Personna for this,
and I'm just gonna cut my pattern out.
And we're gonna give him a little more length on that side.
And again, this is a really quick, inexpensive way
to pattern for accessories and stuff on your puppet.
- [Man] Now, CanYouFathom says that they use white,
thin kitchen trash bags for patterning.
You ever done that?
- No, I haven't.
No.
My concern with that, and I'm sure it would work well,
but the paper towels have a grip to them,
so when you lay them on, they stay in place.
They'll hold on.
With plastic I would be afraid of a little bit
of the shifting, of it sliding around on there.
But still, you could use anything.
If you have some old wrapping paper laying around,
or brown paper bags.
Anything would work.
The main reason I like the paper towels
is because they're flexible, and the grip.
If I just lay this on here, it stays on.
I don't have to do anything.
It literally just stays where it needs to on its own
by kind of locking on there.
- [Man] And Derrick uses painter's tape.
You ever done that? - Yes, I use painter's tape
as well.
The only thing with painter's tape is,
and this is just an issue
a lot of people have is as well, is budget.
Painter's tape is not cheap, it's expensive.
I have a couple rolls today with me,
and paper towels are three cents a sheet.
You know, and a roll of painter's tape is anywhere
from three to 10 dollars depending on the type of tape, so.
I'm thinking budget wise on this, more than anything.
Also, if this is something I'm gonna use down the line,
what I'll do afterwards
is I'll put some spay adhesive on it,
and I'll slap it on a piece of card stock
and I'll cut my pattern out of card stock.
So then I always have the original
and a more resilient pattern to keep for later on, so.
So, say we wanna use this for our mustache.
So, we're gonna take our fur.
Oops, the first thing we wanna do
is see which direction the nap goes.
And all fur's different, and one of the issues
that happens when you wash and dry your fur
is sometimes you lose the nap direction.
So you wanna go through your fur
and you wanna see which way the nap lies.
This one's a little easier to see, it runs down this way.
But, you don't wanna cut it this way,
because if you cut your mustache that way,
when you put it on it's gonna come up
and it's gonna look really funny.
So you wanna make sure it lays correctly.
Sometimes with mustaches too, what I'll do is
I'll do two pieces, and I'll have the nap
running to the sides, especially if you wanna do
like a handlebar with a curl on the end.
And then, excuse me, you would actually cut
two separate pieces and then stitch them together
down the center with the nap
running in two different directions.
We're just gonna do running down on this one.
So, we'll lay it up, we'll trace it.
Try to use, if you're gonna use sharpies on your patterns,
just remember that if you use a dark sharpie color,
you run the risk of it showing.
Especially on a puppet with light skin color
or light fleece or whatever.
So try to use a color that's complimentary
to whatever color you're using.
Brown or black on the back of brown and black fur is great.
If I was doing white fur, I wouldn't want red or yellow
or green or anything that's gonna show through.
So, just be conscious of that.
You can also use chalk, tailor's chalk.
A lot of people do that, too,
especially people that sew a lot
will have that in their arsenal already.
And chalk works great, because it brushes out
completely when you're done.
As long as you don't set it with hair spray.
And hey, guys, thank you for the Bob Ross comments,
and for the makeup artist comments, I appreciate that.
Makeup tips by BJ and the Bob Ross thing, yeah.
We'll do some happy little tree mustaches here.
- [Man] Bob Ross started this whole video teaching thing.
- Oh that's true. - He's the guy.
He started it.
- Back in the day.
And Boxcar Willie started selling music that way.
(laughing)
Alright, so, when we're cutting fur,
and again, I may have covered this in some of the others,
but for people who haven't seen
any of the other DVDs or classes,
scissors, do not use scissors when cutting fur.
What happens when you cut fur,
and I'll just cut a piece to show you.
So we've got all this beautiful nap,
and if we cut our pattern with scissors,
we just cut all that nap, all that really beautiful length,
off the bottom.
We've just cut through that
and all of this just got cut off.
So we lost all that really nice nap on this fur.
So, when we're cutting fur, use a really sharp razor blade,
if you have one, and we wanna kinda hold the fur tight,
and then just cut through the back
of the fur, don't push down all the way to the table,
because again, you'll cut through the nap.
And try to do it in a smooth single cut,
rather than choppy ones,
so you're not jumping back and forth.
And then here too, we'll do the same thing.
And then, you'll kind of have to pull the nap out
when you pull this piece out.
But what you'll see what we have
is all this nap has stayed.
And we got all this beautiful length to work with on this.
So when we get into it, we can trim and style
the mustache and do whatever we need to get a better look,
or a nicer look out of it.
So, we take our mustache,
and then we drape it on our guy here.
I'm just gonna pin this on here.
- [Man] Quick question.
- Yep.
- [Man] This I from CanYouFathom,
did you add any extra allowance so you could roll over
the edge of the fur for the edges,
or you just went right to that
edge of that pattern? - You know what?
I have a tendency to try to make features
more permanent on a puppet, so I don't,
this is off center a little, hold on.
So I don't do extra seam allowance.
The thing with the mustaches is,
I always kinda draw them a little larger anyway,
and that way I know I have a little extra.
But what I'll do is I'll stitch it down,
and when I stitch, I use the ladder stitch that we use,
the Muppet stitch, the whatever.
You know, the stitch that rolls it in.
And I'll stitch along this edge.
So what that'll do is it'll automatically roll it in
and give me a really clean line
along the top edge of the mustache.
And it blends really well.
And then it also looks like the mustache is actually growing
out of the face, rather than sitting on top of it.
It's, again, a matter of preference,
it's whatever you choose to do with it.
If you're just taping it on, like with top stick whatever,
then yeah, you can always roll it in.
The other thing you can do is if you wanna add
a little seam allowance on the back,
you can take hot glue, a hot glue gun,
so you could do a little line of hot glue along there.
And then when you roll it, don't just roll the backing,
actually roll some of the nap of the fur over.
And then you get a really beautiful fur edge
that brushes over.
And it's just a nice way to get a nice clean line.
But, to answer your question, again,
I usually prefer not to put too much.
The other issue too is, and this may be a personal thing
with me is that I have a tendency
to go too big on everything with this,
so if I cut it actual size, when I do apply it
it actually gets down to where it needs to be.
Because if I do add seam allowance,
then all of a sudden the mustache is twice as large
as it needs to be or supposed to be.
It's a perception thing, I guess.
But yeah, that's pretty much that.
Once we've got our mustache on then we wanna go in
and do some styling with it, you know brush it out.
And then start trimming it.
But anyway, it's just a quick way to get a great pattern
really easy using paper towels.
You can also pattern hair like that,
you can pattern beards and goatees, everything.
And just pin it all on there,
and then it gives you a way to try everything out.
And it also gives you the ability to pattern
directly on the head in case the head is not symmetrical,
your pattern still fits right.
One of the biggest problems I see with patterning,
is people will be like, well we need to pattern half
and I'll just flip it, 'cause you can do that in a computer,
you just flip it and do your second half.
99% of the puppets that are custom and handmade
are not symmetrical.
The mouth plate's slightly askew,
the one side of the foam compressed differently,
or the fleece cover tightened on one side.
So when you do your patterns, if you split them
and you just decide to do half and copy it,
there's a pretty good chance it's not gonna fit correctly.
So, it's much easier and more accurate to lay up
a paper pattern on top of it,
and then pull that off and make your parts from that.
So, when you're going into evening it out,
don't make it match exactly because you may be losing
what you spent all that time working to get, so.
- [Man] Quick question before we end this section,
if you do not have Personna blades
and you only have scissors,
do you have any tips for using scissors properly?
- So, if you're gonna cut fur with scissors,
use the sharpest scissors you can find.
Get some good tailor scissors, even the little Fiskars,
but just get some little short blade ones,
don't use long blades.
And then what you wanna do,
when you cut, take the pointier blade
and you wanna slide it as close to that backing as possible,
and then slide in underneath the nap of the fur.
So when you cut,
you're not cutting through the fur,
you're just cutting through the base,
and then you still have that separation.
You're never gonna get it completely right,
you're always gonna cut through some of it,
but you're not gonna get the drastic lines
you did cutting through with regular scissors.
So, yeah, the secret there is just really get in
with that point, and slide it right along that base,
among the backing, and then cut.
And you can get a clean edge.
The big thing with that is take your time.
Just don't rush it, and you'll get a nice clean edge on it.
So.
The other thing some people do too,
is they'll cut oversized, and then once their cut's done,
if they've done that, then they'll go on from the back,
they'll go on the backside.
They'll come in at an angle with their scissors,
and they'll basically kinda press the nap down,
and they'll cut at an angle along that edge
and trim off anything that they might
have cut the first time.
And that'll give you a nice, clean cut without damaging
the nap too much as well, so.
It's a little wasteful, you're wasting some extra fur,
but it gives you a clean edge
and it's a good way to approach that, so.
- [Man] Or you should just get some Personna blades.
- Just get some Personna blades, yeah.