A Private Tour of Dorian’s Doggy Dog Workshop

Apparently, when Dorian can see the finish line, he sprints.

After our last goop party, Dorian not-less-than-triumphantly declared, “There is an end; I can see it!” After which he has been on a paper mache-ing rampage. I came home from work last week to find one of our rooms (we only have three…) converted to a “Dog Workshop.”

Dorian has, in the last week, used up two (yes, 2!) GALLONS of glue, as well as many “double ply” rolls of toilet paper in the making of goop, and has almost finished covering all seven of our life-sized dogs (from the dogs playing poker painting “A Friend in Need”). Dorian has now moved onto building chairs (a quote from him this morning, “I think my least favorite part of paper mache-ing is the paper mache-ing”).

Below, go with Dorian on a tour of his workspace. All the dogs need now, before painting, are their ears and their paws…which is my job…

Paper Mache Enslavement…errrr, we mean “Goop Parties”!!

As you may or may not know, we have been working on making a life-sized paper mache replica of Dogs Playing Poker. Unfortunately, there’s only so much dipping paper in glue you can do before you hit some sort of paper mache wall. And we’ve been bumping up against that wall for a little bit, now.

Fortunately, there are other people nearby! People who can be tricked into doing our work for us when we send them emails titled “Goop Party!” and promise it is a fun time and an exclusive invitation.

After having 2.5 such parties, we have come much closer to completing the project. Still not close, mind you, but the end is now in sight. Beyond what we did in the goop parties, we have finished all seven of the dogs’ faces (we’ll post pictures in a separate post soon). The dogs are now about 64% covered in paper mache clay, which is a blended toilet paper concoction that is much more solid than the paper strips we used for our first layer. And 64% is not nothing on life sized models (…by life-sized, we’re talking St. Bernards and Great Danes, yo! I wish the dude had painted chihuahuas…) Now that it seems actually possible to finish this project, we’re feeling much more motivated to work on it!

"goop party" = "please please help us get this done"

We would very much like the following people for being so gullible:

-M. Appel
-P. Thibodeau
-J. Golden
-M. Thibodeau
-T. Runske
-M. Runske
-T. Harper

And keep an eye/ear out. We may be soon hosting a goop party near you. If you’re on our good side and demonstrate other worthy traits (like juggling), you willl maybe, maybe get one of the exclusive invites. Maybe.

Hello Mr. Cutie Doggie Nosies! or… Paper Mache Stage Three

Balloons, hippopotamuses, the word “hippopotamus”, freshly baked oatmeal pumpkin cookies, sledding down a hill with your eyes closed on a giant inflatable tube.

–Those are all undeniably exciting things.

However, none of those things is nearly exciting as what happened last week–which is…

We finally finished Stage 2 of our life-sized papier mache sculpture of Dogs Playing Poker!

Yes, after

1) Building wire and cardboard armatures, and
2) Covering those armatures with strips of glue soaked paper strips,

We have moved on to “3) Covering the glue soaked paper strips with glue-soaked-and-blended toilet paper goo.” We used the recipe found here (though with wood filler instead of joint compound). It allows for much more detailing…such as little noses, and paws, and toes (!)

…which is also very, very exciting.

Doing Giant Life-Sized Dogs in Papier Mache Takes a Little While

We were challenged to make a Life-Sized Paper Mache replica of Dogs Playing Poker (the painting).

Oh the enthusiasm with which we pounced upon this project! Oh the naivety with which we believed we would be finished in two months time!

You would not think (or we did not think) that dipping little strips of paper in glue, and then smoothening them onto some wire, would take hours. But friends, it does.

To give you a specific idea of how much time it takes: putting one layer of paper onto a dog’s single arm takes approximately 1-2 hours. This time does not include the time spent BUILDING the arm itself, which is another 1-2 hours.

It is true: if we weren’t doing a few other small projects (like our literary magazine postcard, hootreview.com…we just released our first issue!) and writing a novel, and thinking-about-but-not-always-performing acts of kindness…and also busy settling into new jobs…we might move along faster.

Also, it might help if we were paper mache masters…

That said, we are progressing. Our progress can best be seen, probably, in pictures.

Dog party in our living room

Chillin'

After we finish this paper layer, we will move on to making “paper clay” which will be used to shape details, smoothen curves, and generally add support, because I don’t think we have the patience to put ANOTHER layer of paper strips

…which is maybe what we’re supposed to do…

Upgrades and Updates

There’s been so much going on, we thought it time for a little summary post.

First of all (and kind of exciting news)– we have “upgraded” our blog to a real, actual, website. Meaning, we have our own domain. It is easier to remember… it is shorter!

HERE IT IS:  www.difficult-things.com. If you want to make it even shorter, you can also cut out the “www.” What you CANNOT cut out is the hyphen between the word ‘difficult’ and the word ‘things’. If you do so, you will end up at the blog of a man named Jason who has a cat and a mustache.

Now for some updates on some of the challenges themselves:

1. Stage a Wild West Gunfight in an Urban Park:  This is the most important one! It’s this Saturday! If you or anyone you know is going to be in New York or Brooklyn, spread the word! We’re headed up there early tomorrow morning.
 
2. 20 Acts of Kindness: Yes, yes, we promised to do one a day for the last two weeks. But after the abysmal failure of our paper-based attempt, we went back to the longer-taking, elaborate sort. So far, we have done 12 out of the 20 required. Soon, we’ll post information about our prisoner pen-pal (a remnant from the first set of challenges) and his blog.

 
3. Teaching Each Other Things: We keep going back and forth on what to choose! There are so many options. So many things we want to force the other to do! But our decision on this, too, coming up.

 
4. Bike Ride to a Grandmother’s House: Since we have decided NOT to move to Vietnam this fall (instead we will be sticking around and writing, along with other projects, we have decided too to move this challenge to a time when the weather is cooler and the sun is less present. Probably at the end of September. Also, we still need to get bikes. If you have a bike that you would like to loan us for the summer, that’d be great!
 
5. Life-Sized Paper Mache of Dogs Playing Poker: This is deserving of it’s own post. But for now, enjoy some pictures:

Dorian has a way with animals

which one is the real dog? -almost impossible to tell

Challenge: TEACH DORIAN how to Make Giant, Life-size Papier-mâché

Or maybe we should just say: The challenge of making a giant, life-size papier-mâché diorama of dogs playing poker (from the “famous” paintings) contains the delightful mini-challenge: teach Dorian how to papier-mâché!

As we continue to work on the papier-mâché of dogs playing poker (see image below) the divide between Amanda and Dorian’s craft-making skills becomes all the more apparent . . . and enormous.  From the start, we knew that Amanda would be in the driver’s seat, taking charge, instructing Dorian on what to do.

But now we know that even her basic commands, like “Make a torso,” really contain lots of mini-commands.  “Make a torso” really means . . .

1.  Look closely at the dog’s torso in the picture.

2.  Imagine what the part of the torso that is not visible in the painting would look like, using your knowledge of dog anatomy and your ability to make inferences from the other dogs in the painting, thus gaining a full image of the torso.

3. Squeeze chicken wire into the shape of the torso.

4.  Squeeze the chicken wire that was displaced by your previous squeezing of the chicken wire (step four), so that chicken wire more closely resembles the torso.

5.  Repeat step four, subtly . . .  forever.

Two different torsos from the same amount of chicken wire! Dorian is a squeeze master!

*Also, note that there is a secret step between steps two and three, which is: “Check with Amanda . . . and make all of the corrections that she says.”

**Note: all of these steps are done before what is technically known as “papier-mâché” even begins . . .

So yes, this challenge is coming along beautifully.

Here are some pictures.  We actually started to do papier-mâché!

Life Sized Paper Mache of Dogs Playing Poker…real work begun

Arrows indicate wire sculpted dogs

In a previous post, we displayed our first attempt at paper mache–three beer bottles. We also described the rather time-intensive five-step process we were going to used to build the larger objects.

Well, we have finally braved those larger objects, and started building…DOGS! So far, we have decided which breeds are the gambling sort (St. Bernards, Great Danes, bulldogs…), and constructed wire armatures for the torsos and heads for three out of seven of them. See below:

View from behind, as is in the painting

The wire forms are quite expressive, aren’t they? It is surprising how much personality some squashed chicken wire can have. O, the power of line!

We’re a little concerned that as we continue to work on them–further define their form–they will actually lose some of this personality?

But maybe not–It’s dogs! And dogs are so . . . . . . . “ENGAGING.”    (…Dorian is keeping a tally for how many times I use the word “cute” to describe our creation-in-progress. And I am trying hard to keep it at a number below Embarrassing.)

Another Paper Project Begun

Paper mache, like origami, involves paper. Except in mache the process involves mostly ripping, rather than folding. Paper mache has, so far, been much, much easier.

Since neither one of us is a paper mache expert (yet) we started off the project by making one of the smallest items in the painting—A beer bottle (we THINK it’s a beer bottle…it might also be some A1 sauce).

The painting IS, by the way, this one:

Looks like the dealer is also the bartender here...

See the beer bottles in the background?

Now—for advanced paper macheing, when you’re building large items apparently the PROPER thing to do is to first build an “armature” (fancy word, ooh) out of chicken wire. A beer bottle is not large, but since we were using it as a way to get a taste of the bigger things to come, we decided to try out the chicken wire. Plus, I was a little excited to play with the wire cutters…

We:

1. Made a chicken wire cylinder.
2. Bent and squeezed and shimmied that cylinder until it looked somewhat bottle shaped.
3. Covered that cylinder with glue-dipped strips of the Montgomery County Women’s Journal.
4. Boiled itty bitty squares of same journal, so that they fell apart into nobbly fibers, which we mixed with Plastic Wood Filler.
5. Slapped this pulpy goop onto our bottle.

This took about 3 hours, and was a lot more work than necessary for a bottle, as a friend pointed out…so for the remaining two bottles, we used two empty ACTUAL beer bottles, and covered these with gluey strips (this took 30 minutes). After they dry, we’ll simply cut off the mold, and glue it back together. Remember doing this to bowls, in your elementary school days?

Guess which one took the longest...

Well, from our three bottles, it looks like the simple way was much much more successful. Our elementary art teachers knew what they were doing! But we’ll need to use the more complicated pulping process as we move on to building whole tables and…dogs!

Life-Sized Paper Mache Replica of Famous Painting–Coming Soon

We are finally set up in Philadelphia. All things are moved, and we have established locations of all important things (library, Barnes and Noble, Asian grocery store/rice supplier).

We had planned on finishing our first set of challenges before we got here. It should come as no great surprise that we did not, in fact, reach this goal. But we have done some cool things, and completed five of the seven. Well, almost five. And this means…

…We have some room on our list for some new tasks! Wahoo! (<–Dorian will probably make some comment about how this exclamation is an obvious indication of who is writing this post).

We have not yet decided all of the new challenges we are going to accept, or how many…but we have picked one. And a glorious one it is. You will find out what it is on the next line. It was also the title of this post…

…Yes! We are going to make a life-sized paper mache replica of a famous painting!

The original challenge was to create a paper mache of The Last Supper–but some audacious paper mache doer has already done this. An alternative painting presented itself as an option. And that painting is….(so much suspense in this post)…

…We’re not going to tell you. But you’ll see bits and pieces of it as it comes into being.

As for the challenges we have remaining–we’re just waiting for the prisoners to write back, and we only have 19 acts of kindness left. Almost done. I prefer not to think about the one-handed pushups.