From Canada

with love.

Here are a few pictures of the progress on the transformation of my old angel prop (with the help of my Canadian friend) into my new Joan of Arc prop - or as PumpkinBrian enlightened me to - should be Jeanne d'Arc.

She is currently holding a sword, that is where the inspiration for this transformation came from. I posted that idea on my blog and PumpkinBrian (Okay, we are going to call him PB, cause that I am lazy and a bad typist - for the rest of this post.....it is better than calling him a banana :D ) was kind enough to offer his help. I jumped at the chance!!

Here is the progress on the transformation.

Carved a shield shape out of a piece of pink foam, took the jpg that PB gave me of her family crest, printed it out tiled, taped it together and then cut and dremeled the pattern into/out of the pink foam.

I then found a $6 ringlet/crown type thing and painted it with black spray paint and then dry brushed it with two different shades of gray.

I then took the elements from her crest and cut them out of thin craft foam. I glued them with polyurethane construction glue to the front of her dress. This is to give her outfit more of a "uniform" look. Not pictured - I then brushed the foam with monster mud to keep the consistant texture.

PB sent me a "quote" from her in French translated to English. I was originally going to use the French quote, but being the dense American that I am, I gave into to all the talk that no one would "get it" and went with the English translation.

I have to work with the existing base of the angel because this is one of our earlier props before we wised up and learned to create removable bases - which means she is stuck on her current base forever :)

So it was a long quote but I was able to make it fit. I picked a nice difficult to carve font, because I really wanted it to look special. My other tombstone carving buddy, who has helped me so much took one look at that and went....you are on your own on that one :)

I created the file in Illustrator and printed it tiled to fit the 1" foam base.

I carved the wording into the foam and them decided that I wanted to tart it up a bit and add some scroll pieces to the side, so I glued a couple of strips of 2" white foam with Nano glue to the sides.

When the glue was dry I rounded out the foam corners to make the background of the plaque look like a scroll.

I drew on some swirly bits on the sides of the scrolls and carved in a deep groove.

I gave it another coat of black and let it dry.

I then painted both the shield and the plaque black. Not pictured, I did finish painting and aging the shield and the plaque. I am trying to figure placement of the shield at the base of her feet.

I have one more detail I want to run by PB tonight and then I plan to complete her transformation this weekend.

FQF