Morph Making Workshop

As I mentioned on Sunday I went to a Morph making workshop as part of the Radio Times festival last weekend.

For those of you who don't know Morph is an animated plasticine fellow who has been on children's tv for ever and is made by Aardman, the same people who make Wallace & Gromit.

Everyone was given the same amount of Morph-coloured plasticine and a little bit of black and white. 

Morph doesn't have an armature so you start but rolling the plasticine into a ball then pulling out bits to make a kind of starfish.

Then you make the bits into the head, arms and legs, and add thumbs.

The only time you remove a bit of plasticine is to make the nose, which is added on separately.

Then you use the white and black plasticine to make the eyes.

The only problem with the workshop was there weren't any visuals to work from. So when I got home I looked at a few pictures of Morph and worked on my model to make him look better. I mainly made his head rounder and made the eyes bigger. I also used a teaspoon to make the proper mouth shape, as suggested by the guy running the workshop.

I put a photo of my finished Morph on twitter and the actual Morph favourited it!

Printing with Plasticine

   I've recently been coming up with ideas for the Saturday kids art class I teach occasionally.

   To help me, my Mum gave me some art books she's collected over the years to look at.

   You can tell she's had this one for a long time because she's written her maiden name on it.

   I came across this fun idea for printing and wanted to try it for myself.

Luckily, I already had the two things I needed; plasticine and a cotton reel. I knew I'd been holding on to them for a reason.

I covered the cotton reel in plasticine and found some things to imprint into it. I started with a circle pattern using buttons, beads and the end of a paint brush.

I think the middle strip is the best as there was a bit too much excess paint on the first (bottom) try.

Most of the paint comes off the plasticine as you roll it so there's only a little bit left to wash off. Then you can smoosh (technical term) the plasticine together and start again.

Next I tried imprinting a piece of lace trim on the plasticine.

Again, the second roll looks the best as there was just the right amount of paint on the roller at that point.

I also did a print where I'd imprinted a square wooden bead and a lolly pop stick in the plasticine.

One thing about this technique is that as you roll, you end up squashing the plasticine so the shapes change. This means you can't really use the plasticine to get the same pattern over and over again.

Then I thought about adding to the plasticine base instead of imprinting into it. I used more plasticine to make this flowery pattern.

It turned out really nicely. For this one I applied the paint with a sponge so it would only go on the raised parts, instead of dipping the whole thing in paint.

Then I tried adding circles of plasticine which turned into ovals as I printed.

So that was a fun new technique to try out.

What objects do you think would make a good print?

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