Padding out the bodies

The next step was to flesh out the armatures with upholstery foam. Before I did this I wrapped the armature in plumbers teflon tape like this...

I didn't stop to take pictures of this but its basically just a case of completely covering the armature so the foam can't clog the ball and socket joints. This tape is extremely flexible and shouldn't restrict any movements in the joints.

When the armatures were completely covered in the tape I could go ahead and flesh it out with upholstery foam. I got two sheets of foam about 20mm thick, sprayed one side of each with Adhesive Spray ( I use 3M's PhotoMount, its alot stronger than SprayMount) then lay my armature in between the sheets and stuck the sheets together. It was like an armature sandwich with foamy bread and armature filling! :-)
Then it was just a case of trimming the foam to the shape I wanted using a small nail clipping scissors.
Here is a picture with the female character roughly trimmed to size.

I went through the exact same process with the other armature.

To finish off the shaping i wrapped them with thin foam sports wrap, this is the kind of stuff you might put under an adhesive bandage to stop it sticking to skin. A layer af this stuff, again held on with spray adhesive, really smooths off the roughly cut foam.

So thats the bodies shaped, next step will more than likely be moving onto the hands.

Thanks for reading,

Paul