Sculpting out of foam like material. How to start carving a red panda tail

Materials  Scissors- First, you need some sort of sharp item to carve the foam with. Scissors work just fine.  A strong solid foam piece- Next, you need to get a piece of mostly solid foam to be carved out of with your sharp item. This is the item that will end up being your final product.  Paper towel and table- Now, you need to find a flat and solid surface to set your project on while you work, a table works great. This is optional, but if you want to stay out of trouble with this project I suggest that you find a tablecloth or paper towel to set on the table to catch your mess while you carve.  A Pencil- You need a pencil to start drawing your design.

Start to carve out designs  Carve- carve your piece of foam into a cone shape.  Draw- Start to draw lines with your pencil going around the circumference of the foam cone piece. I suggest that you draw each line about an inch away from the other.  Carve out little chips- With yours scissors carve away little chunks from your cone about the size of the tip of your pencil. Make sure you don’t carve too deep though because then your foam might become to thin. A way you know you have gone deep enough is that the foam will become a cleaner and somewhat softer white foam. Make sure you’re only carving little chips like this every other stripe or line, so that it will show a difference between each line showing the difference of color in a red panda’s tail. This is a red panda’s tail showing you the difference of colors.

Shaping your carving  Curving your carving- In this part you will need to start rounding the fat end of your tail into a rounded tip for the end of your tail. This is the part of a red panda’s tail that is black, the stripes would be creamy orange, and reddish orange. This part will most likely take a long times since you would have to make this part rounded to make it look realistic. You will have to make sure that you round you scissors at the correct time, and at the right angle. If this were a computer program you would have to move 1 pixel at 1 degree about 200 times. This is because this movement on a computer will create a half a circle looking like the 2-D shape of the tip of a red panda’s tail. This shows the black tip of a red panda’s tail.

What I wanted to do  My overall goal was to carve a whole red panda, tail, body, face and all. Time restricted me to only be able to start working on the tail. For the coloring and texture of my tail I wanted to take a bunch of little white pieces of furry material and die it, or do anything I had to so that the white pieces of fur would show the color I wanted.

Why I wanted to do this  Floats- I wanted to make a Styrofoam sculpture because that is how you make a float, as in big float in a parade. I found this information very interesting so I wanted to learn more about it so my way of doing this was by trying out a smaller version of one myself. I decided to do a red panda because that is one of my favorite animals and it seemed pretty easy to do. I decided to call my work a sculpture because I think of the float that is just sculpted with no color as a sculpture so why not call a smaller one a sculpture too? A cool thing about float making is that they sculpt these huge things then they have to go back and find a way to color it. This is a float with barely any color that was sculpted or carved out of styrofoam.

Bibliography  Image on page 3- Image on page 3- a%20bear%20tail.jpg  Image on page 4- Image on page 4- content/uploads/2008/02/redpandatail.jpg b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/image_content_width/hash/ 53/e2/53e24cf a0adbddc935c.JPG?itok=BFE47JBe  Image on page 6- Image on page 6- b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/image_content_width/hash/ 53/e2/53e24cf a0adbddc935c.JPG?itok=BFE47JBe