The producer and the director of “There Will Come Soft Rains” — which you should go see — asked me to build a new head for the dog in the show. We discussed budget and at one point the producer asked if I needed money up front for materials.

I laughed. “There is no materials cost for this project.”

“How can that be?”

Allow me to explain. I start by using a piece of scrap blue foam as the base for my sculpture. I just trace the profile of dog’s head on it. Now if I’d bought a piece of foam, the cost of this piece would be, maybe, fifty cents.

I then cut it out with a bandsaw.

Next I turn it ninety degrees and draw the top view, which also gets cut out with the bandsaw.

I rough cut the shape with a saw.

I sand it a little to take off the hard edges and give me a loose dog head shape.

I sculpted the details in clay. I prefer working in waterbased clay because I like the feel of it, but for this I used plasticine clay because I had it on hand. A block of clay costs between $12 to $20, but once you’ve got it in stock it gets reused.

You can see that some parts of the sculpture still show the blue of bare foam. If I were planning on casting this I’d have used clay over the whole surface to make it very smooth because the details would show up in the final. But, I was planning on doing direct mache which tends to obscure details so there was no need to go overboard in making things smooth. It took me about two hours to get to this point from the original drawing.

For the first layer of papier-mache I used an old script and a couple of rejection letters — my favorite material — and wheat based wallpaper paste. The wallpaper paste is the only material so far that I’m not able to reuse. Estimated cost of the amount I used? Maybe forty cents.

The key with papier-macheing is to not get the paper too wet with paste. If there’s too much paste, it will form airbubbles as it dries. Those reduce the structural integrity.

For the second layer, I alternate with brown paper bag. It’s got nice long fibers and is heavier than the scripts so it tends to be stronger. It is also a different color which makes it easy to make certain that I have even coverage on each layer.

Each layer takes about 45 minutes to do. If I were going into a mold I could work faster because only the first layer — which is the top layer in a mold — matters. The other layers can be all wrinkly and they’ll have no impact on the level of detail in the finished product.

With direct mache every single layer and every piece of paper matters because each one obscures the original sculpture or has the potential to introduce an unwanted wrinkle.

For this, I did five layers of mache. White, brown, white, brown, white. That’s fairly standard.

The same number of layers in a mold would take about forty-five minutes total. So why didn’t I make a mold? Time. Making the mold would mean less active working time, but I’d also have to wait for it to dry before using it. A damp mold means that it would take forever for the mache to dry. So using a mold would mean less time for me, but a longer overall process. Plus, I knew this was a one-off. We won’t need to make a copy of this.

Even without worrying about a damp mold, I still made a jury-rigged hot box to speed the drying process. It’s basically a hairdryer and an upside down bin. Like the world’s ugliest easy-bake oven.

I used a mat-knife to cut the mache off the sculpture by carving right down the middle.

Warning: If you do this and discover that the mache is still damp inside, make sure you tape the thing back together and dry it. If you let the two halves dry separately they will warp, which is unpleasant.

I ran a bead of hot glue down the halves to hold them together and then papier-mached the seam inside and out. The mache gives it strength, the glue would give fairly quickly.

This is pretty fast, I don’t think it took more than half an hour.

I also seal any raw edges, like the ones around the back of the head. It’s prettier, but more importantly, it keeps the edges from peeling.

When the head was dry, I painted it with gesso. Let that dry. Sanded it. Painted with gesso again, one more light sanding and then started to paint. For some puppets I’ve done between five to eight sanding and gesso layers depending on the degree of polish I wanted. For this, I wanted a little bit of smoothness, like bone, but not all the way to porcelain.

Here’s a shot of the finished head and my design sketch.

And this is the head attached to the original dog body.