Almost all of Merikay’s animal creations have a paper maché sculpture inside. The exceptions are the small, soft stuffed items. This page describes how she makes these sculptures.

When Merikay first started making animal heads, she created each piece from scratch with paper maché. Each sculpture was unique, and when it sold it was gone. But when people saw her animals at friends’ homes or saw photos of her work, they ordered what they reasonably expected would be similar items.

Such expectations led to the creation of a set of master sculptures that brought greater consistency to her work. The masters for the Elk/Wapiti and Buffalo are shown at right.

Merikay creates each master sculpture from scratch using paper maché, as she did her for original work. To create a master, she has to visualize the basic form of the animal, without fur, skin, or horns. In some cases the masters “evolve” over the years, sometimes toward greater accuracy, sometimes toward a caricature of the animal.

After the master has dried thoroughly, it’s wrapped with water-resistant plastic tape. The masters of popular animals like the Buffalo have been used hundreds of times, and its tape has been patched. The black lines indicate where to leave edges when covering the master with paper maché, to make it easier to remove the derived sculpture after it has dried.

The Buffalo’s horns are a simple shape that can be part of the basic sculpture. For the Elk and other animals, making horns and antlers is much more involved.

Merikay recycles our newspapers to make her sculptures, using uncolored, low-ink-density pages like the classified sections. She tears them into strips ranging from 1- by 3-inch strips to 4 by 6, depending on the size and complexity of the animal. A paper cutter would make this easier, but produces “hard” edges that are visible in the completed sculpture, while tearing produces soft edges that blend together. If you look carefully, there are some strips in the foreground of the picture to the left.

Next Merikay mixes “art paste” with water and dips each newspaper strip into this mixture before applying it to the master. She builds up six to eight layers before allowing them to dry on the master sculpture.

This process is sometimes called the “shell method”, and is used to make Piñatas and other hollow forms. In order to remove the shell in the traditional method, for many shapes one has to cut it into sections. Since this can damage the master sculpture, Merikay leaves seams not covered by the paper strips at the black lines on her masters, as you can see in the photo.

On a hot sunny California summer day, the paper maché will dry in 24 hours if it and the underlying master are left outdoors in the sun. In the rainy winter season the sculpture can take several days to dry in the studio or near the wood stove.

When the first layers of paper maché are dry, Merikay removes the sections from the master and tapes them together, then seals them into a single sculpture with several more layers of paper maché strips. The image at right shows the Elk and Buffalo shells after they’ve dried.

While hollowness is a necessary characteristic of a piñata, a hollow sculpture isn’t durable enough for an animal that people want to keep for years. To make them more permanent and durable, at this point Merikay fills the hollow shells with firmly packed crumpled newspapers coated with more art paster/water solution. Again, the weather determines how long it takes the sculpture to dry after this step. Recently Merikay has also been experimenting with expandable foam for filling sculptures.

In order to hang on the wall, the sculptures need a flat rigid backing and a hook. To make these, Merikay cuts a thin plywood back to match the back of the shell, drills two holes near the top, and inserts a loop of picture wire. The final steps in creating the base sculpture are to tape the back and the sculpture together, and then wrap several layers of paper maché strips over the edges. After their “eye blanks” are added, our Elk and Buffalo look like the image at left.

The next part of the “How They’re Made” story is Horns and Antlers.