No Bones About It

Today I made a skeleton!  Rather, I took a dollar store skeleton garland that looks like this:

And fixed it up a bit.  I gave it actual joints beyond the shoulder joints and the hip joints.  This next part is a little technical... I noticed that the shoulder joints were connected to the upper ribcage, which is entirely incorrect, so I connected it instead to the clavicle (the collarbone, which, on these little plastic guys extends right to where the shoulder joint would be).

How did I do this miraculous thing, you might ask?  All you need is a piece of cardboard, a pushpin, and wire, and scissors.

Using the cardboard as a buffer, I pushed the pin through the skeleton to make new holes, one a little above the knee joint, one a little below.  I did that for the knees, shoulders, wrists, elbows, and cut the joints apart with a scissor.  At this point, I filed the edges down a little with a nail file.  Finally, I strung the joints together with wire, and painted the whole thing.  In the pictures, the eyes look darker than they are; I mixed a middle gray so it wouldn't overwhelm the rest of it.

Here he is, chilling with Poe.  Poor Poe.

Okay, this picture isn't very good, but there's something I want to talk to you about, buddy to buddy.  Have you ever found something fully stellar but it's made of plastic and it looks like it's made of plastic?

Have I got news for you!  I found silver nailpolish  at the dollar store, and it works like a dream to make plastic look more metallic.  Now, this picture is definitely twenty-two shades of awful, but I haven't painted the knives yet, and you can sort of tell the difference.  The light reflects differently.  Better.  The knives look flat, and the other stuff has dimension.

I built a centaur out of foil, paper, and pipecleaners, and a cheap dollar store horse.  He was hollow, so I snipped his head off easily, and the white hair peeled off of the head (I'll use that later).  The napkin paper I used was too thin and it made him look lumpy, so I covered him up with regular paper, glued all to heck.  I filled him with pennies so that he'd stand up, but I found out that dollar store horses don't stand up anyway.

Here's Andy Warhorse! 

He needs clothes and tweaking, but... anyhow.  Anyone up for Cambell's Soup?

I did a repainting of a cat yesterday, and I made the mistake of not taking a before picture.  But the cat came from this container of dollar store animals, so you can just imagine how hideous it was before.  White and orange, with the kind of face that is best described as (please don't hate me for this) a sourpuss.

Here she is.  The house now has a Professor McGonagall.  I used acrylic and repainted it about five hundred million times, because tabby cat patterns are not easy to paint in a way that doesn't look like (well) it was painted on.

And thanks to a lovely suggestion, the next thing I'm going to try for is a K-9!  Thank you so much for your feedback!  I'm thrilled.  : )

I'm going to start out by saying that I'm now addicted to a website called dollarstorecrafts.com

My goodness, it is such an inspiration for broke artists like me!

I went to the dollar store the other day and picked these little mysteries up.

What are they even?  It was a big mystery to me until my sister pointed out to me that they're supposed to be baby bottles with a little ring on the side to hang them up by.

A few of the tops came off easily, but most of them didn't.
Now I have several blue cups!