Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey folks, my name
is Lucy and I'm with Ballyhoo Creations
where I design dolls, puppets, and flushes. Most of the things
that I design usually have a wire armature in them so that they
can hold the pose. You can also use them for
stop-motion animation. I'm going to show you
different ways to make wire armatures and you can use that to pose different
dolls, flushes. You can add movement
to a puppet, and then you can also
use them to make stop-motion characters for your own little stop-motion
animation projects. We love video shorts and little stop-motion shorts are a great thing if you want
to put out on TikTok, Instagram, Reels,
things like that. Stop-motion animation
is a great thing to learn and you can animate a lot of different things just by having some very basic
tools and materials. In this class, you're
going to learn what tools and materials
you might need to make your own stop motion
or poseable figures will make a human-shaped armature
from start to finish. We'll talk about other shapes, such as hands, quadrupeds, some birds, different
things like that, and how you might
go about putting an armature into
something like that. We'll also talk
about how to insert an armature into a purchase
doll that you have. We'll talk about ways to make
poseable figures that are really small or really big for Halloween props and octopus over here we've got all
different shapes and sizes, and you'll see a little bit
of all of that in this class. Even if you don't really care
about learning about wire armature then matter because we're going to do some fun
little things in this class. Come on in and be amused.
2. Class Project: For your class project, show us the armature
that you make. I'm going to show you different examples,
different figures, but you can make a
human-figured one like we're going to
do in the class. I'll show you from
start to finish how to make something that
looks like this. Or you could also
show us the figure that you put the
armature inside of. Show us what you're
going to make. Let us see the finished product
of what you've learned. Get as creative as you want. Maybe even show us a little
stop-motion animation. That would be so cool. Just upload your project, whether it's a photo
or a short video, or a link to a video somewhere, just upload it to the
class project section, and we would all love to see it.
3. Materials & Tools: The materials that you use for your armature are pretty important because it determines not
just the strength, but also the flexibility of
the finished wire armature. There are a lot of different
types of wire out there, so I'll show you
several that work, why some are better than others. Let's start off by talking
about wire because that is the main material
for a wire armature. Obviously, my favorite kind to use is this armature wire, and I'm going to put a
downloadable sheet where you can find different
types of armature wire. That way, I won't have to upload a new video
if this changes, I can just fix that sheet. Go ahead and
download that sheet. It'll give you a
shopping list of where to find these wires. But what's special about this armature wire is that it's made of annealed aluminum. The annealing process makes
it not only easy to bend, but it also resist breakage. So you can bend it back and
forth a lot more times than you can with irregular
wire and it won't break. That's important because when you're moving around
your wire armature, you're going to
be bending a lot. The elbows and knees and
stuff like that will get a lot of bending done and you
don't want that to break. Eventually, all wire will break once you
manipulate it too much. But the armature wire made of annealed aluminum
resist the breaking. That's why I like it
also because it's very soft and easy to manipulate. I've found it in two sizes. This one is a 0.2
centimeter or 0.11 inch. That's the thicker wire, and then there's the 0.055 or 0.1 centimeter which
is the thinner one. I think there might be
one other thickness. Wire is usually
measured in gauge, but the armature wire is not. I have not seen that. Another option that
people like to use is a steel wire and this
one is a 16 gauge. You can maybe see it there. This one is not my favorite because it does
break more easily, and also it's stiffer. It's harder to bend. It's harder on your hands if you're moving a
lot of this around. It is about the same thickness as this smaller armature wire. You can see there as
far as size goes, it's about the same thickness. The 16 gauge steel wire
versus the 0.055 inch, or 0.1 centimeter diameter
of the armature wire. They're similar, but
the aluminum bends much more easily and it's actually
a little bit stronger. The steel wire is an option, you can get it in thicker wire. This is also an aluminum craft
wire that works fine too. You can use something like a floral wire and
they are different. You can get little
pre-cut pieces. You can find it in rolls
or spools like this. This stuff is fine for
smaller armatures, but they can't carry
very much weight because this is just
too thin and flimsy. It's also good for
wiring bigger pieces of wire together and
attaching things. That's an option. You could even use pipe
cleaners or chenille stems, and craft stores may even
carry something thicker like these big thick fluffy
ones you could use that. These are fun in creatures
that move around. They come in different
colors for the seasons, and they've got some
different thicknesses too. So it's just another
variation of a chenille stem or pipe cleaner. Those can work on some things. One other thing that
you might want to use, but this is optional. This is an epoxy clay. It's a two part
clay that you mix together and I won't be
doing it in the lesson. But if you need to
hold something firm, like maybe you want
the arm section. Arms only move at the
elbow and the shoulder. If you want to put
some epoxy clay on the forearm and upper
arm so they don't bend, that is an option. The hip area is
another good place. Some people put it in the chest. It's just an optional
thing that just depending on how much range of motion you want your
figure to have, you could use an epoxy
clay if you wanted to. Besides wire, you're also going
to need one or two tools. You will need some pliers. Needle nose pliers
are really the best for working with this wire, and most of them will have a
wire cutter built into it. Or I like to use
these little wire clippers or nippers because they can get right down
to the surface. Whereas with this
it's harder to get a nice close cut with
the nippers you can. These are inexpensive tools, probably under $5 for
either one of these. One last thing I'd like to
mention is electrical tape. When it comes to taping
up your figures, you don't want wire poking
through their sharp ends. You don't want it coming through your cloth or felt figure, and so wrapping that with
tape is a great idea. The best tape to use for wire is the one
that's made for it. That's electrical tape,
that's my preference. You could use other
kinds of tape, but the electrical tape is not only made to stick to wire, but it releases very easily. If you need it to come off, it won't leave a
sticky tape residue and I liked that too
because if you mess up, this stuff is easy to take off. It also has some stretch to it, so it's easy to get a nice
tight seal on your wire. My preference is electrical
wire, but again, if you don't have that available in home improvement shops, but you could also use
something like duct tape, or whatever tape you have
around should also work. We looked at different
kinds of wire that you can use
for your armature. From armature wire, steel
wire, pipe cleaners. There's all options there, and then I also showed
you the pliers and the cutters that you're going
to need to work with wire.
4. Making A Human Armature: Best way to get a feel for how the process of
making an armature works is to see one in
progress being made. I'm going to show
you how to make a human-shaped wire armature, and then at the end of that, we'll also talk about
different shapes that you could try as well
in the next lesson. Let's jump in and make an
armature for this little guy. This one is already wired, but I'm going to use
this figure to show you how you would measure and create an armature for your
particular shape and figure. I'm going to turn him over, less distracting that way. What we have here is just
the basic human form: head, torso, legs, feet, arms. He doesn't have
individually wired hands, so we don't have to
worry about that. You could put something
in the thumb. I'm not going to, that's
a little more advanced. I'll show you an example
of a hand in a little bit. What I'm going to
do for this guy is figure out how long
it needs to be. For this particular one, the head comes off and there's
no wire armature in there. So I only need to do the neck. If you need to include the head, you would want to
have a wire loop that's big enough for
the head right here. For this one, though,
we don't need that. I'm going to measure, and
he is nine inches tall. So I need my wire to be
at least nine inches, but that front is from
the neck to one leg. I'm also going to need from
the neck to another leg. What I typically
like to do if I'm making a human figure is I take that measurement
nine inches and I multiply it by three. That typically will
give you enough wire. Now, if you also want
to wire the head, add a few more inches onto that. That would be, let's
see, maybe another two and that would
two up and two down. Add another four
inches to this one, if you wanted the whole
head to be wired. I'm going to be on the conservative side and
cut 30 inches of wire. That would be this
long piece here. Now for this figure, just for this size, I like to use the
thicker armature wire for the torso and the legs, and then I use a twisted pair of the thinner
wire for the arms. You'll see that process next. Now that we know how
big we need the wire, I just fold that in half and
squeeze it up at the top. This loop at the top is
going to go into his neck. Excuse the disembodied doll, but when you're making wire
armatures for figures, you're going to see a lot
of body parts lying around. Now we want to twist
the torso area here, and that length goes about to here because his legs
start right in this area. I'm going to hold it together
right there and be careful that you don't pinch your
hands because this will pinch. I like to separate
them like that, and that prevents it
from pinching me. Then go ahead and twist. When you twist wire like this, it will shrink up on
you and get shorter. We're going to need to verify that it's still
the right distance. Yeah, that's actually
really good. It's going to go all
the way to the top up here and down here, the legs end right there, so I'm going to have
them go straight out. Then I like a hip that
is bent in this shape. The reason that we
like to do it this way is this will give
you more stability for a figure that stands. Because if you do it
where the legs just go straight down like this way, you've got a lot more
play in the legs. Your doll might splay out
like this and do the splits. Whereas if you have that
bend right there in the hips and the way that
the rules of physics work, you've got forces going
straight down this way, and it's a much stabler figure when you have that
square hip area. Put it back on our figure. If you have a drawing,
you could do it that way or you could
use the actual figure. I like to take my pliers right at the bottom
where I need to bend it, and that's going to make it bend right in the
right place for me. Same thing with the foot length from the leg and I need it. I'm going to go right outside the toe and bend
it back on itself. Then same thing with the heel. But this one's a
little tricky because I actually want this to be like a paperclip shape
and go around that way, and I can't bend
through the table. I'm just going to
have to figure out where I want that bent to be and then turn it around. See, I lost my place. Let's do the other side. It's another way of doing it. Right there, and then
twist it around. The reason this gives us a nice stable foot
because you've got both the toe area and the heel, and it won't rock
back and forth. Then just squeeze that. Depends on how your doll is. This is a very skinny foot, so I need my foot area
to be very skinny. If you have something that
has a much wider foot, then you could go ahead
and fill that out. It'll be a lot more sturdy
and stable when it stands. I don't need that excess, so I'm just going to cut
it off right about there. Sorry for all the noise. Wire is noisy, and that's
my paperclip foot shape. I'm going to do the same
thing on the other side. Right there, bend up
for the toe area, and then bend that
heel back too. We don't need this extra, so clip that away. Anywhere in this looped area is fine to clip away the extra. Again, because of the
skinny foot that I have. Skinny, is that a word? Just go ahead and squeeze. Try to get it so you can
see what I'm doing here, squeezing like that. Let's double-check the shape
before we're finished here. It's got good foot area shape. Yeah, that's going to fit.
We're in good shape here. I like to cover up
this sharp end right here on both feet, and then I also like to make sure the hips are taped
together because we don't want this scissory
action happening, so I take that. So it's nice and tight. As explained in the
material section, I prefer electrical tape. But you could use
what you have if you don't have electrical tape. That way that sharp end of
the wire is not going to move around and tear into the fabric and tear a
hole in your figure. Same thing, I'm going to
do the hips so that they don't wobble around too much and just a
little bit of tape. I mean, you only need an
inch or two to do this. I'm going to stretch
that tape so that it gets really tight. Let's put it around a few times. I mean, we're not going
for any beauty contest. It's going to be
hidden inside of your cloth figure
or whatever anyway. For the arms, I have found in this particular figure,
I've done many of these, so I know that I need about the same, 30 inches, but you would want
to measure again, just the wingspan, get the arms spread
straight out like that. That's I'm going
to say 10 inches. It doesn't have to
go all the way. You could do 10 and 1/2, and it's going to be double. So we need at least 20 inches, and then we need a
little bit of extra so we can attach it
to the body here. I've already cut 30
inches of this wire. This is the thinner wire. I'm going to find
the center of it. You want it to be a little bit longer
because when we twist it, it's going to shrink up and you'll see that
in just a second. That's a little bit too
much extra I think. Let's see. Yeah, that's better. Then right there in the
center of the body, I'm going to cross
that over and twist. About two twist is all you need. Now we've got
something like this, and we're going to
grab both ends. These are the hand, the ends
of it, and we're just going to start twisting in
opposite direction. So I'm going away from myself on the right hand and
towards myself on the left hand, and just twist
it, twist it, twist it. The tighter you twist, the more it starts to
shrink and get shorter. Remember how that was a
little bit long before, and now it's the
right length because that twisted wire has
shrunk up on itself. If we twist it even tighter, it will shrink even more. That's a good length there. To insert it in here, you can just loosen. You can either do a
half twist there and then squeeze it together, and you'll get a little
hole in your twist. Insert that wire and
take your cloth figure or whatever figure you're doing, and make sure that your wire isn't
way up in the neck or way down in the belly button. You want it to be right in the chest area between the arms, and this is pretty
good right there. Just go ahead and
twist that off. Then the way that you attach it, it's not really important as long as it's
not going to show. I just wrap mine around
the body a little bit. You can even come back up again. You could clip it
off and not rapid,. It's up to you what you
do with that excess wire. Because I have sharp ends
all over the place here, I'm just going to
press those down with my pliers and then use
electrical tape to wrap it up. Before I wrap it, because I did a half
twist and loosened it, I'm going to do
another half twist and tighten it back up again. There's no right or
wrong way to do this. This is just a method that I found tried and true.
It works for me. If you have another method that you've seen and want
to try, go ahead. There's no really no rules. Some people say it needs to
be done one way or another. That's not really true,
from what I've seen. I've been doing this
for many years. Now, if you're making a
professional armature for professional stop motion, that would be a
different process because they have a lot more use than what we would do in a
small studio or home studio. This guy is really flying
all over the place. I'm going to wrap
the entire body just to make sure that
all of those ends are covered and I'm going to
wrap him twice actually. In this electrical tape, not only does it keep those
pokey ends from coming out, but it also gives a
little bit of glide and slipperiness so that
the wire doesn't catch on fabric when you insert. There is a wire
armature, full body. Again, if you needed to have the head and you had
a bigger loop here, you would just want
to fill that out so it fills out the head
if you needed it to. That's all there is to it. That was making a wire
armature from start to finish. You saw how to measure the
figure that you need to make and get both the arm measurement as well as the torso and legs, how to get the feet
to fit if you need feet on your armature.
So that was it. Then you also learned how to use the electrical
tape to cover up any sharp pokey bits and
keep it all held together.
5. Other Figures: Not everything is human. What do you do if you need a wire armature for
something that is not human shaped or this weirdly human shaped. Let's
talk about that. These guys are
still human shaped, even though they're
this weird heart body, they don't have a neck like
we did in the last armature. This one is just actually pipe
cleaners, the snail stems. Cute little stop
motion thing you can do with these little guys. Then this one does have the wire armature and
he's built differently. He has the thick wire for
his arms and his legs. He's more like this
shape here where he doesn't need the feet
like we did before because the tennis shoes with flat bottoms are going to
be his feet so they just went straight into
the shoes like that and you can use epoxy or even foam to put in the shoes to hold
your wire armature. That's another possibility. You could even do
something that's not one of the starfish, you could do something like
this that creeps around. Here I have a really big octopus and this one has armature wire in most of his legs, and that's something that I use
to decorate for Halloween. He can hang on to things, I can move his legs around. Some of his legs don't have
armatures because he was actually made to cover
a goose-neck lamp. But he would still wrap
his hand around and the goose-neck
would go inside of here and be part
of the armature. If you look through the fluff on the bottom
of this octopus, you can see that's what I did, I just took several
different wires and I crossed them in the center
and just tape them together. That holds everything in
place well enough that it can go up inside the arms and
give him lots of movement. What about birds? You can do wired
armature, bird feet, this is very popular when making bird dolls and figures and these are actually wrapped
where you wrap a thinner wire around
the main stem. Then when you put
floral tape around it, it ends up looking very much
like a realistic bird feet. That scaly look. There's one main wire that
comes down here and forms the main toe and then another wire is attached
to that main toe. Then these two smaller
wires are also attached down here in the
middle and this particular one, I went ahead and ran
the leg all the way up to the body up to here. If you can see where that is, that's the armature there. That way it gives a
much better balance on the bird because you can manipulate that upper
body a little bit and get some of the weight up here and
not just down in the legs. His wings are also wired
with a very thin wire, it goes all the way
through the body. It's under the fabric
here in the middle and then it goes through a
channel in these wings. There's one piece of wire
from fingertip to fingertip. You can manipulate the wings
in different poses that way. What if you have not
a biped like a human, but a quadruped like
a dog or a cat. It would be the same
type of figure here. You could use a thicker wire for the arms instead of
the twisted thin wire. But if you notice, just flip those legs, flip those arms, and guess what, now you've got a quadruped, just move that around
and manipulate it. It would be the
same principle that you could use for
a quadruped dog, cat, lions, tigers, bears, whatever, you could use
the same type of thing. I would prefer to have
a thicker wire here to match and then you could just
do a loop at the edge here. You don't have to
do that paperclip if it's not going to
stand up on its hands. But if it does, if you
want it to do hand stands, then you would want to go
ahead and have something rounded like this so that
it will hold the weight. Let's also talk a
little bit about how you would wire a hand. You can just outline
the shape of it. I'm going to stop
there with the thumb in the middle and then just
do each of the fingers. Let's go a little
faster through this. Now that I have four fingers to match that puppet hand in
there about the right size, I can just twist each one
of them and this way, each one has a blunt tip so it's not going to poke
through the fabric. Then for the bottom
there, you can either connect that to something in the arm or you could cut it off and cover it with
tape, it's up to you. Then I've got a hole
here in the arm. Then you'll have to
manipulate it to get everything back in shape again. Just play around with
it and then you can do all different hand poses
and whatever you want. We talked about
human figures and we talked about
non-human figures. I've showed you bipeds, quadrupeds, octopeds, birds, several different ideas
even hand we looked at of how to figure
out how to insert, how to create and insert a wire armature into all
kinds of different shapes. Just use your imagination, draw it out if you need to, and figure out the
best way to have the wire armature and how
you're going to insert that.
6. Retro Fit to Existing Figure: [MUSIC] One more thing
that I wanted to mention, if you are buying some doll
that you want to add wire to, this is just a
silly old rag doll that I have lying around. But a lot of people like to use elves and things
for the holidays. You buy them at the store. I for trademark reasons, can't say the name of them. But if you have a
doll that it stitch, the arms and legs are
stitched into the body. So there's no opening for
you to slide the wire from the body into the arms
on something like this, but you can still do it. I'll show you a
sneaky little way. Just get you some
little scissors. You can just cut a
little hole right there. Very small hole big enough
for the wire to pass through. Do the same thing in the body because it would be
too much work to take this entire thing apart. But we can put a
little bit of wire through it just by making
those little holes. This one has, and it's got several layers of
fabric going on here. I'm trying to get through
them. There we go. Then take whatever wire
that you're using. I always would recommend
that you bend the wire. You don't want a sharp pokey and going through your fabric, especially, and I
can't say this enough. If you are doing a child's toy, I would not put wire in that. Need to say that
several more times. I've got my blunt end there. Preferably you would
go ahead and tape this up and then just run
it through that hole. If you're dealing with a store-bought toy or
something like that, a plushie that you want to put wire in and it's
already stuffed, that does present
some more challenges, but it still can be done. The length that I need
all the way there, leave a little bit of extra
because we need to be able to loop around from blunt edge. How much do we need?
About that much. For something like this
that's already constructed, it is easier to do your
armature in pieces. You don't have to
do the full body armature like we did earlier
and then try to insert it. You can do just do something from the head down into the
legs and then do the arms. You probably don't need to
attach them in the center, but depends on what you're making and how you
want to pose it. This is a really fun thing
to do for holiday decor, especially if you have kids or if you're just
a kid at heart. Like me, I do lots of little posed elves around my
house at Christmas. I do little Halloween figures. Then of course,
stop-motion animation. You can do video shorts and things like that.
Have fun with it. I'm trying to be careful that
the stuffing doesn't get all bunched up because that's
what it's trying to do. This is not going
to look like it was done at the factory, but it is going to give
you a poseable figure. Poseable meaning you
can make poses with it. Not opposable, like it's
going to oppose you. That would maybe be a bad thing. I think it's opposing
me right now. When you do this method, you will see a little bit of the wire there in
that shoulder area. If your doll has clothes on or something like that,
like those little elves, you can buy all
kinds of clothes for them or just pose it so that you don't see
it because from the front that's
not visible at all. But now we can do things
with her. [MUSIC]
7. Stop Motion Tips: [MUSIC] I am no expert at stop motion animation by any means, but I do like
playing around with it and I've been doing
it for a long time. Just a little quick
little videos in shorts and things like that. It's a really fun thing to do
and people really love it. It's just tickles
your funny bone. It's not that hard to do, especially with cell phones
and tablets these days. It's actually pretty easy. I'll give you a few tips
and tricks on how to do that if you want to try
it out for yourself. The first thing
that I would advise is set up your cell
phone or tablet. I've got an iPad here and it's actually got
a tablet holder. It's attached to. Let me see if I can show
you a little further away. I've actually got
this little clamp and an articulating arm
that goes on the table. These are not very expensive, about $20, $25 for
something like this. You could also use a traditional
tripod that works too. Then as far as lighting for
your stop motion setup, I like to use these
little lights like this that light up my
table or a small area. These are very
inexpensive as well. They're just little LED lights and they even have a color
temperature on them. If you want it warmer or cooler, you can control that, control the brightness, get different levels
of shadows and things. You can see the surface
below what's happening. If you're a fan of
photography and natural daylight, I I'm too. But for stop motion animation
is really not a good idea. The reason for that
is the sunlight changes as a cloud moves
in front of the sun, your lighting situation on your stop motion scene changes. It just causes a lot of light flickering as the
light goes in and out. It may not be that
noticeable to you, but when you watch a little
movie is very obvious. For that reason, it
is better to have an artificial lighting setup for most stop motion animation. The apps that you
can get for stop motion animation for your cell
phone and for your tablet, have a nice little
feature called ghosting, so that when you move you take a picture and
then when you move it, it shows you where
it was before. That way you know
just how far you want to move it.
I don't know why. He's just like slide has
been around the table. It's weird but you get
the picture there. You can see how it's ghosted and where
your last move was, and how you want to do that. You just keep taking a picture. This is why if you're touching the actual screen
is very important, everything is very stable. You could also use a remote control button
to do that instead. That actually works
better if you really want no movement. That's just a couple
of tips that I can give you for stop
motion animation. Lighting. Getting a
little lighting setup with a couple of small lights
is really all you need. Then getting an app on
your phone or your tablet. Those two things will
get you started towards some really decent stop motion animation for
cute little shorts. If you do try that
out, post a project, or give us a link to
what you're doing because we would
love to see that. That's so cool [MUSIC].
8. Wrap Up: [MUSIC] That's everything
I wanted to tell you about making wire armatures for poseable figures or stop motion animation,
stop motion puppets. You can make them in any size from really small to really big. Like I've got this
girl back here, you've probably seen
in the background of all of these little
videos I've been doing, and she actually does have armature wire in her arms
and also in her legs. She's a nice creepy thing that I use for Halloween decoration. She does not have armature
in her head and that's for next year because she
keeps flopping down. [LAUGHTER] Whether you're
making human figures, animal figures, something somewhere
in-between, it doesn't matter, the methods that
I showed you and the skills that you
picked up in this class, should get you started
to using wire for making either poseable things
to decorate your home with, or for making stop-motion
movies and shorts. I hope these lessons
were useful to you. Please upload your project to the class project
section so we can all see the great things
that you're making. Also, if you have any questions or things that you are having
a hard time figuring out, post your question in the
class discussion area, and I'll be able to come
in and help you out. Pictures are worth 1,000
words, so that can help, show us what you're trying
to fit a wire into. Then we'll help you as much as possible down in the
comments for the class. See you later folks.
Luci Ayyat, machine embroidery, dolls, puppets
