How to Make an Armature Stand

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hi there welcome uh my name's neil grant and today we're going to talk about sculpture armatures i'm going to show you three different variations sculpture armature i'm going to show you how to make two of them um one of my biggest considerations when i think about sculpture armatures is how easy is it to get the piece off of the armature at the end if it's a complex armature i'm using with lots of bits of wire and uh various other pieces that's really tough so i like to use something nice and simple um so here are the three we're going to look at today so here we have them um we've got three armatures for us to look at um the first one is just really really simple it's um toilet plunger handle um onto a wooden board uh we actually had a bit of an emergency in a class we ran out of sculpture stands so this was put together at the last minute um it's just a simple screw in the base um literally just um a toilet plunger handle and i'll talk a little bit about these bits in a minute but uh just a big washer and a little clip and this is a really easy one to make for yourself um this one in the middle this is a purchased one um you can buy them online i bought this from pcs studios i think cost about 18 bucks with postage really simple uh little stands a little bit of dowel um the job of the washer is done by a piece of wood here a little screw on the side that allows you to tighten it now the aim of the washers and this little board here is when you put your portrait off it stops the clay slumping down so you imagine building your neck up building your head up gravity makes the uh makes the clay want to want to head for the deck and these little washers here stop it doing that so really useful one early on as the clay begins to sort of um harden and stiffen up a little bit um you can move these out of the way but when you start you really want these in place okay and this stand on the end this is my favorite one this is made from plumbing parts very robust pretty cheap to make and in terms of longevity what you tend to find with these wooden based ones is after a while they get a little bit moldy they expand with the moisture of the clay so their lifetime is sort of limited compared to these ones here which stick around forever the only problem you ever get with these ones is uh rust so uh ironically for water pipes they like to rust so um sometimes you need to soak them in vinegar give them a bit of a go with a brillo pad or a scouring pad and that will restore them so here we've got all the parts to make the dowel based armature um the process for making the base of the armature is the same for both the plumbing part one and the dowel one um so we'll start with that i've got a simple piece of uh this is half inch ply you can use three quarter inch ply it's a bit more stable a little more expensive and i've got it about 10 inches by 10 inches square here and that's gonna be my baseboard i've got two little runners here these can be any size you like um as long as they are shorter in length than the board and uh they're both the same size don't get any even ones because you're gonna you'll get a one piece uh armature stand i've got a piece of dowel here so this is about uh three quarters of an inch thick uh you could go sort of up to an inch um 12 inches long i've cut it to i've got a ruler now this ruler is slightly it's not your regular 12-inch one just simply because i need to be able to span the board here while drawing some of my lines so you can just use a piece of wood as long as it's got a straight edge on it you don't need to do any actual measurement with this we've got a bit of uh pva so a bit of wood glue here got a charcoal pencil you can use a regular pencil i'm just using charcoal so you can see it it shows up well on the camera i've got four teeny weeny little nails here now their job is just to hold my runners in place while i glue them onto the base of the board i've also got a screw um this one is about three inches long um longer the better um because it gives you more stability a short little screw is probably going to if you put a bit of weight on to the onto the armature it's probably going to go sideways i've got my teeny weeny little hammer for my teeny weeny nails screwdriver i've got a drill now the drill bit is just slightly um smaller than the actual screw itself in diameter so it should be easy to go in and then finally i've got my safety glasses all important safety glasses now uh things either belong to napoleon dynamite or elton john before i got them i can't tell her but i'm gonna pop them on um so first thing we're going to do is we're going to glue the uh little runners onto the base of our stand so i'm going to pop the glue on i'm just going to use a i need an enormous amount just to sort of yeah wood glue is really really uh strong stuff i live out on the cape and they build an awful lot of boats out here using an awful lot of this glue so i'm just going to place these on here like this now literally it doesn't really you don't this isn't isn't precision carpentry or anything like that so i'm just going to place them on like that i'm going to take it it's going to flip it think i've got them over right i'm just going to tack them in place there a couple of nails [Music] that's nailed in you know i'm not going to win any carpenter rewards for it but it's totally fit for purpose so we've got two little runners on the base there that glue will set up in probably sort of 30 minutes it cures fully overnight um so next stage for us is we're going to mark up our board now what i'm going to do is i'm simply going to draw across uh corner to corner so go across like this hopefully you can see that okay with the charcoal pencil across like this and that is the center of our board so we figured out center we've got something that was roughly square drew some cross lines and then we've got the center what we're going to do next is we're going to um put a hole in our dowel so we're going to pre-drill it to make our life easy first thing i'm going to do is i'm just going to draw across a real sort of straight up just trying to get roughly you know where is the center of my dowel here because that gives me where to drill okay so we've marked across on the end of our dowel rod so that's our our sort of cross hairs are our target to aim for with the drill and so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to put it into the vise just so it holds it don't try and do this by hand got to do it safely so i'm going to move over and [Music] i'm going to put this into vertically into the jaws of my vice let's tighten it up a little bit there we go so that's not going anywhere then i'm going to take my drill and i'm going to aim for the center of the um the dowel rod so here we go um if you've got a particularly loud drill you might want to think about putting some defenders on at this point there we go we are we are drilled so there you go you can see we put a uh little hole in there so we're going to do next is we are going to do the uh the big boy version of the dowel rod so we've got a much bigger target to hit here uh we're just going to drill a hole through our baseboard so the screw can go through and into the dowel rod now um the main thing i'm thinking about when i do this is not going taking my drill and going through my desk as well um so obviously do this on a work desk don't do it on your on your chip and dale um so what i'm going to do is i'm going to drill but as soon as i feel the slight pressure release i'm going to pull back on the drill bit so i don't go through the desk alternatively you can prop this up on a couple of books maybe just give yourself a bit more bit more space so here we go there we go i'm through um will be revealed that i hit the desk no i didn't so i can see you we've got our hole all the way through now in an ideal world if this were uh if we don't carpentry shop we would countersink this hole here so it was nice and flush i'm not going to bother with that because i don't want to make it get a countersinker because we've got the runners on here we don't need it we're not going to scratch our table because the runners are in the way okay so what i'm going to do next is we're going to attach our baseboard with our screw to our dowel um i'm going to put a little dab of wood glue onto the end of the dowel here just to hold it nice and secure um there we go just put a little little spot there what i'm going to do next is i'm going to take my baseboard i'm going to come up from beneath it with the screw now i'm going to do this by hand with a screwdriver what i'm going to do is i'm just going to screw it sufficiently out can you see there's a little very end of the screw just comes out there what that allows me to do is that allows me to line up the end of my screw into my dowel rod just hold it there and then i'm just going to screw it in [Music] all the way down there going to take it out of the device and there we go one dowel based sculpture stand so what we'll do is we will let that um let that glue dry up overnight okay so the one thing i forgot to mention was um putting on our a little support washer and [Music] popping on a little hose clamp here so um well governed by the laws of physics so the hole in your washer these are just steel washers you can buy in the hardware store the hole in our steel washer needs to be bigger than um the diameter of our dowel rod otherwise it's not going on there what we're going to do first though is we're just going to pop on this is called a hose clamp you'll find them over towards the plumbing section normally or you can pick these up in automated stores places like that so that's going to go on there what we will do is we will tighten this to the height with our screwdriver of where we want it to go and then the steel washer will go on next so there you go that's a complete fit for purpose dowel sculpture armature okay so we're going to make our armature stand with the plumbing parts now so we've got our baseboard to the same point uh so we've got our runners on it we've got our big x on there so we know where the center is let's talk a bit about parts so we're going to use a 12 inch uh plumbing pipe so you can get the galvanized ones there are ones for you'll see ones in the store that are black some that are galvanized either works um they do sell a plastic one actually um that is super good from the perspective of keeping it clean it doesn't rust but it's not quite as strong as these uh these pipes so this is a half inch it's 12 inches long half inch diameter this is what's known as a half inch flange and you'll find these right next to these normally in the plumbing store or in the hardware store so just pick up one of these so this is going to go into here and the only thing we need to do is fasten it down onto the board so i'm going to do that um these are sheet metal screws uh they are three-quarters of an inch size 12. so sort of short and stubby these little fellas um you're going to need your drill need a pencil i'm going to need a screwdriver so first thing we've got to do is pre-drill some little pilot holes for our screws to go in now the way i line up on center with the plumbing flange as you can see it's got the four holes in if i put it onto the center spot so we've got that x marks the spot uh our treasure island styling um what i'm going to do is i'm going to line up each of the four holes so that a line passes through it um if the line doesn't pass through it then you're probably off center so i will hold this up so hopefully you can see what i've done each each of the lines passes through there now what i'm going to do is i'm going to take my pencil i'm just going to mark where each one of those is so i can drill a little pilot hole so you can see what i've done okay so next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to drill the part the pilot holes uh for the screws obviously select a drill bit that is smaller than your screw diameter uh if you do it the other way around all your screws is gonna fall out um there is the potential for if i just drill straight down on this there is the potential for um the board to spin so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to clamp it to the edge here like this just to avoid it spinning around so i've got my big clamp that's not going anywhere now again i'm going to remember i'm not going to put enormous pressure on my drill uh because if i do as soon as i go through the board i'm through my desk so um always want to avoid that so i'm just over the pilot hall hole i've got the drill bit on there and away we go [Music] okay one two [Music] okay just get rid of all these little uh little wood chips go to uncap this now so what we're going to do is going to sit down first and move these out of the way we're going to line up the holes in our flange with the uh holes we've just drilled in our board hopefully they match up if they don't then something's gone a bit wrong then what i'm going to do is i'm going to take my screws and again if you are fortunate enough or prefer to use an automatic screwdriver you can um i normally just sort of loosely place them in here um i always tend to always tighten screws or anything like that in diagonals that's uh that's what i was taught um what i'm going to do is i'm going to screw in each of these screws into the baseboard okay so there you go we've screwed the um flange onto the baseboard you can see here what i always check for is have any of the screws come through to the other side it's just little points you can catch your fingers on so if they have come through just take a file and file them down um i'm lucky on these they haven't uh that's one of the other advantages of a three quarter inch board is that's not going to happen so there you go we've got our baseboard we've got our flange screw to it next thing we're going to do it's going to take our pipe i'm simply going to screw it um righty tighty so uh clockwise in there there you go there you've got your stand now um what we can look at is um the different washers we can put on this so we can use exactly the same arrangement that we did for the dowel so you can put on a hose clamp put on your metal washer and just tighten the uh tighten the hose clamp a little bit of a tedious process so we can tighten that into place imagine i tighten that and that will just hold that there my preferred arrangement is to use a little i think this is a one inch um this is what it says on the label one inch little c clamp so i just tighten that on there and you can use that again with the metal washer on it goes that's going to hold your your neck in place when you've got a load of clay on here or alternatively if you know a carpenter friend um which i do fortunately he just cut me some little uh wooden washers that's it on there the advantage of those is they're just a bit wider they spread the waste a little more there you go that's our uh plumbing stand um this is the one i typically use this is the one that i like uh but any of the stands we've seen uh today are gonna work they're all gonna be perfectly adequate um you know i think uh what did they say a good workman or a bad workman blames his tools so um your sculpture stand you know the ones we've seen today are great so um i have to blame something else all right um thanks for watching and uh see you again soon

Channel: Granty Art

Views: 7,922

Keywords: sculpture armature stand, armature, portrait sculpture, fine art technique, clay art

Id: Qj61N8jZG_0

Length: 22min 3sec (1323 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021