I’ve posted a new Instructable on making a stuffed kitten; that makes a whopping total of two since my wooden ratchet noisemaker last year. The cat wasn’t a prop for a show, but I thought I’d share it for two reasons. First, I made it out of materials from a previous show that would otherwise have ended up in the trash. Second, our prop shop had just gotten our first sewing machine. Before this, our artisans had to go to the costume shop to work on upholstery and making things out of fabric. I’m not much of a soft-goods person; in fact, the only actual item I’ve ever made out of fabric is probably a sweater in my seventh-grade home-ec class. I took this new acquisition as a chance to practice a must-needed prop skill; you’re never too old or awesome to start learning something new.
Tag Archives: tutorials
Friday’s Galaxy of Links
- Cosplay  (costume roleplay) websites are a great place to find low-tech solutions for making items like armor and weapons. Sorcery and Glue is one of those sites that also has a really cool name.
- Mental Floss presents the different stories of 7 Stolen Movie Props.
- Indy Mogul, which frequently has great tutorials for film props and special effects, has an extra-super great tutorial for making soft broken glass out of hot glue.
- Finally, here is a nice collection of packaging from vintage crayons, paints and art supplies.
Monday Link-ography
For your Monday’s enjoyment, here is a short list of some more sites to augment your prop making skills:
- There’s a great tutorial on how to make a laser rifle from Fallout. In fact, the whole Volpin Props blog has a lot of superb build logs for a range of replica props.
- Decidedly less hip is this collection of tips and techniques for making Lord of the Rings costumes. Costumes, you ask? A lot of the tutorials are for costume crafts, which share a lot of methods and materials with props.
- Glass Attic has a stream-of-conscious information page about the various forms of polyester and epoxy resins. While there, check out the rest of the site for a whole polymer clay encyclopedia
Friday Link-o-Rama
I thought I’d do a roundup of some of the links I’ve come across; you may have noticed some of them appearing in the sidebar on the webpage.
Also, I’m getting married tomorrow, so I don’t have time to do a whole post!
- Stagelink – A large directory of theatre and entertainment people, suppliers, and news.
- Blue Room Technical Forum – A UK-based forum for backstage theatre, including a whole forum devoted to props.
- The Producer’s Perspective – Ken Davenport has produced a number of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, including Blithe Spirit, Altar Boyz, and You’re Welcome America with Will Ferrell. This is his blog.
- Mask Makers Web – A community of online mask-making resources, including a forum and plenty of links.
Dragon Skin
This week, at the Public Theatre, we begin working on some props for The Bacchae. Since there is going to be a dead corpse which is picked apart and torn up on stage, Jay Duckworth has ordered some “Dragon Skin” from Smooth-On to experiment with.
Many of us in the props world are familiar with Smooth-On and their range of products for molding and casting. My father, a potter in Pennsylvania, has been using their polyurethane for years in his mold-making, and they’ve really pushed some new products for theatrical purposes in the past decade or so.
But wait, there’s more! Their website isn’t just some bland information portal. They have a treasure trove of guides, tutorials, and instructions for using their products. On the special effects and propmaking section you can find step-by-step video sequences, photo sequences, and examples of what other people have done with their products.
You can also find a Smooth-On video channel over at YouTube. This contains many of the same videos showing molding and casting with their products as their website. They also have a list of “Favorites” showing videos from other users making and casting molds.