Updates on the Papercraft Devil

 

When I was creating my first prototype for this papercraft devil mask, I printed my templates on 15 sheets of paper. I first printed the horns on three pieces of paper and constructed them before printing out the remaining 12 templates. This allowed me to test the paper and make sure my templates were working properly. 

Since I've already completed my first prototype, I decided to optimize my templates to reduce the amount of required paper.

After working on the prototype last week, I decided to maintain the same scale for my final work. Originally, I had wanted to make a very large mask so that it would resemble the traditional Venezuelan ones but I would have had to dissect many of my forms to make them fit on the 8.5x11" sheets of paper.  

As you can see in the image above, I improve the nesting of my forms, which allowed me to only need 12 sheets of paper instead of 15. This not only reduces the paper-waste, but it reduces the amount of work for the laser-cutting-machine. Since these new templates reduce the amount of work, the machine will finish cutting in less time. However, I decided to hand-cut my project since I am unable to deliver and pick up the templates from the university in the upcoming weeks. However, it shouldn't be too much of a hassle because I learned a lot of tricks and tools that can speed up the manual process.

Quite honestly, I did not receive any suggestions on improvements for my templates during last week's student speed-critique session. With the amount of time during each meeting, it may have been hard for other students to look through all my forms and spot errors. Fortunately, I was able to notice issues in my work when I looked at it with fresh eyes this week. The main thing I noticed was that I had not fully optimized the space on the sheets of paper and had applied too many tabs. With these things in mind, I improved my templates accordingly.

These are photos of a few of the printed templates. I mentioned in last week's blog how many of the pages became curved when they passed through the printer. This made them a bit harder to work with when I was folding and gluing because the paper wasn't straight or rigid enough.

At this point, I am done cutting out all the forms for the final papercraft mask. Now I am in the process and re-constructing the model.

This is a simple step-by-step of the construction of the eyes.

I began to construct the head to get a headstart for next week. I still need to add the lips, mouth, teeth,  frills, and horns to this structure but I am feeling very good about my progress!