Diablo de Yare: First Prototype

This week, I am constructing my first prototype of the Diablo de Yare mask I created in Rhino last week. 

I won't be constructing the whole mask since it would be too much for a one-week-assignment, but I will be making a few of the key parts. 

Even though this is just a prototype, I want to test printing the templates on different coloured pieces of card stock because that is how I will print my templates for the final version. Since I am using various colours, each component takes longer to construct because it is separated into sub-sections rather than being one form of the same colour. 

I bought two packs of Astrobrights' 65 lb cardstock from Amazon for this project. Even though there are only 3 sheets of each colour, the colours range is really wide which is nice. 

Building the Devil Horns

The first components I began to construct are the devil's bull horns. Each horn requires 4 separate pieces of paper to be joined together (as shown in the digital model pictured on the right). 

To match the model, I chose to print each segment on a different colour of paper to give an interesting banded look.

Pictured Above: Three 8.5 x 11in templates for two bull horns

When making the template for the top and bottom segments of the horns, I found a way to print really bright score lines on black paper.

In Rhino, I set the “SCORE” layer to the brightest yellow (#FFFF00) and changed the line width from “hairline” to “0.7mm”. I changed the line width in the print dialogue box. 

I really recommend doing this because it makes it infinitely easier to see the template lines. I have a pretty standard printer so it should work for most people.

The horns came out quite successfully! They took a couple of hours to make since they are the first papercraft objects I have made. It took me a while to figure out how to align the forms and I kept looking at my digital model as a reference. There was a stage where I could not recognize the faces of the template or match them to the model. This made me wish that I had labelled the faces of the 3D and unrolled versions of my models. 

I ended up choosing different colours for my papercraft object than the ones found on the original model. 

I decided to use a new pink version of the mask as a model. I felt that some of the features, such as the eyes, were highlighted better with this alternated colour palette. 

 

Tweaking the Model and Printing Out all the Templates by Colour

Last week, I printed some templates and noticed some errors in my model that I wanted to fix for this week's prototype. I spent several hours unfolding my updated model and strategically placing tabs to avoid redundancies. When unrolling some of my forms, I labelled the different faces with numbers to make the assembly process easier. I was able to do this with a Grasshopper definition that Bryan showed me how to use. This worked great on many of the pieces and it even labelled the 3D forms with the labels to match the unrolled versions. After unrolling the forms, I spent a long time planning how to print the sections since I had limited sheets of coloured cardstock. I ended up having to print twelve 8.5 x 11" templates as you can see in the above image. 

Even though I am not constructing the entire model this week, I printed out all the templates because I plan on completing the mask soon. I also cut and scored every single component of the model so that I have it ready to go.

Scoring and Cutting the Paper Model

After printing the template, I began to score and cut the forms. This took hours (about 10 hours to be more specific). In the above image, you can see the forms from 2 of the 4 pink template sheets + the black nostrils.

Since I had 12 new pages full of templates, I had to be very careful with each part to ensure that the whole form matches in the end.  I am shocked at how much slower the process is than what I anticipated. 

Even though I tried to reduce the number of tabs before printing out the templates, I continued to catch many tab-redundancies. I made notes for myself and cut down the shapes to have fewer tabs.

  

I also learned a lot about good tools for scoring. After about an hour of working with the paperclip, my hand started to cramp up a lot since I was working with really small detailed sections. At that moment, I remembered that I had a number of clay carving tools that would be perfect for scoring.

I found that the tools pictured above worked better than the paperclip and the long handles were really ergonomic. Out of the 4 Arteza tools pictured above, my favourite ones for scoring are the first two (notice how the first one has a nearly identical shape to a paperclip). These tools are from a 42-piece clay toolset I bought on Amazon for $40--the product is worth the price.

 

Building the Snout

After completing the horns, I began to construct the snout. This was the first section of the model that I designed on Rhino and it is interesting to see it taking form in real life. I really enjoyed gluing the dual-toned nostrils because they folded almost exactly like the digital model. It was less fun to glue the pink snout together because there were many small triangles that made the process more complex. At one point, the glue from the UHU stick was not holding the snout together at all and I ended up trying rubber cement and glue from a spray can. The spray can glue ended up working the best.

 

Making a Simplified Version of the Reptilian Frills

This part of the process reminded me of Zim and Zou's work because they like to layer coloured paper to create decorative designs. This stage was enjoyable because it was very simple, it felt like a bit of a break from the other intense forms. 

Making these prototypes helped me gain confidence doing papercraft projects. I also feel a lot more confident with my model--I was worried that my templates would be flawed or that I could not recreate the mask, which is quite complex. But I noticed that my templates are reliable and they do recreate the exact forms that I constructed in Rhino. 

I am excited to see how the full mask will look like--so far I am liking the real paper models more than the digital ones!