The Mantids are coming! The Mantids are coming!

My Preying Mantis Oothecas finally hatched yesterday!

I'm convinced they came, in droves of several hundred to a thousand, to check out the immense Mantis that has been poised near their tank in my living room.

Pretty tiny!

This is all from one Ooth, I have 6! (2 unhatched)

I have been constructing a Pseudocreobotra Wahlbergii (Spiny Flower Mantis) sculpture for a couple weeks on and off. (He's sharing his time with a project I'm doing for 'Junk to Funk', that's for another blog) He's a bit further along then what you will see so far. I want to show the creation in pieces so I could talk a little about the construction and maybe give a tip or two.

 I immediately regret not taking pictures of the construction of the actual body. However, I have included a diagram to help. 

There's a variety of mixtures you can use for paper mache. I really like the recipe I've been using though, so I wanted to share it.

Paper mache recipe:

                       1       Part  Woodglue

                       1.5    Parts Water

The woodglue dries into a plastic-like substance and therefore adds a little bit of waterproofing, but mostly solidity. The recipe I used (And a good deal of my method) came from the book 'Papier Mache Design with advanced techniques' by Monique Robert. She gives you wonderful instruction on making structures that are solid utilizing basic shapes. It's nice to have a paper mache book that isn't geared towards middle school art classes.

I looked up a lot of images, and decided on the sub adult version. They have a lovely curled up abdomen that just adds for a lot of cute, and a really good balance for the piece. (Also since the structure is going to be large, saving any space I can is a plus)

Work up a doodle of your pose!

I then began the process of creating the basic shops. I made many spheres, tubes and flats. Spheres were made by taking globes and wrapping them with cellophane. This allows you to remove the mache from the globe so that you can use it again. I used a little masking tape to hold it in place. You mache in strips over the entire structure. Tubes and other strange shapes (like the egg shaped styrofoam pieces i used for the eyes) are done the same way. For flats I took a piece of plywood and taped cellofane down smoothly over the top. I used a paintbrush to cover the cellophane in paper mache glue, then I laid a sheet of newspaper down (a sheet, not strips), then I painted on top of that newsprnt. I added as many layers as I needed (depending on how flexible I want it, and how sturdy it needs to be.

The basic shapes

A: Oval  made with a Styrofoam egg

B: A flat that I wrapped to be a cylinder, then taped the edges and paper mached over the joints and the seam to keep it strong.
C: Boxboard strips that I used to create a soft curve and then placed paper mache strips on top.

D: more boxboard strips, this time to make a straight connection, I could have used a flat like (B) only cut shorter, it doesn't really matter either way.

E: I need a little point so I cut a couple pie slices out of the sphere to make it end in a point. 

 

Hello!

The face was a sphere with a lot of cuts to and modifications. The mandibles are pieces of fish tank tubing I had laying around. It's rather stiff, and it was coiled, so it has a nice cruve to it. I plan to wrap them in mache as well. The tubes for the antennae and the base of the mandibles were just pvc pipes I had that I covered in plastic wrap.

Coming up next: Leg Costruction!