And now we're down to the details. You know all those pesky little things
that seemed cool back in August, but can stretch a project into Christmas.
At this point, you can just paint your skeleton, slap on a coat of sealant, and
stick him in the yard. Or you can go with the full option package.
Skin the stick
"What? You've got to be kidding."
Nope. I wrapped Crow's tree with thick shop wipes saturated in glue. When dry, this hard shell dampens some of the stick's springiness and will protect the wood as it ages. In time, I suspect that it will prevent cracking and splintering. Of course your choice of wood will make all the difference, and if you're familiar with the curing properties of ash versus maple (I'm not), then you might decide to focus on other things. Like entrails.
Make some entrails
I'm of the opinion that you can never have enough vines or entrails. Crow could probably use twice as many as I gave him, coiled and draped all over. These entrails are just ropes of twisted newspaper.
1) Roll up some ropes. How long to make them depends on how crazy you want to go. If you're so nutty that squirrels follow you around, then start with 10' lengths.
2) Skin your ropes with glue-saturated shop wipes. Arrange them where they belong while they're wet, and give them a day or so to dry.
After much whispered discussion, The Moth Brothers agreed
with my assessment.
"Add more entrails. They
might attract bugs. We like bugs."
Skin yer bones
Crow is ancient, perpetual. So there's not a lot of what you might call skin left on his bones. It mostly just covers the newspaper on his back and chest, and it's made from brown paper towel and diluted Elmer's glue. Rip up some brown towel, wet it with glue, and squish it around or stretch it to form wrinkles.
Exposed "bone" is covered in white shop towels. Same routine as above, but with fewer wrinkles. Make sure to leave some rib bones showing, though. You worked hard on those.
During the skinning process, you may discover that your skeleton has a few Gigeresque accoutrements, often due to certain engineering accommodations. You can leave them alone or apply camouflage. Bumps can be smoothed into humps (the difference between Igor and Igor with a bus sticking out of his back) by packing wadded newspaper around the bus, then skinning over the whole area. Alternatively, a few scraps of cloth tacked on here and there work well to conceal the odd structural snafu.
If a few bumps really aren't that important to you (they weren't to me), then ignore them. If someone complains, tell him that when he builds his skeleton, he can spend all the time he wants smoothing out all his bumps. Then offer to check his head for bumps with a stick.