Most people would make a papercraft skull as a Halloween project , but I'm not most people so I made mine in April. This isn't the first skull I have made. The first was around two years ago, it was made of paper, cut out with scissors and glued together using Pritt Stick. It was always my intention to add LEDs to the eye sockets to make it extra spooky but because of the strength and quality of the build it is a little fragile and i didn't want to destroy it.
Having gained some more experience from the Oceans Project Little boat, as well as an X-Acto knife, a cutting board and PVA glue I decided to re-visit this project and add those red LEDs. It would also be a good project to control the LEDs from a small microcontroller programmed in C that I was exploring in my last blog post.
The first step was to print the Skull onto card. I chose 160gsm from Ryman It is thick enough to have the required strength but still easy to work with. The Skull design is from Ravensblight.com As well as the Skull there are a lot of other spooky/monster themed Paper craft projects to make. It was the design I used the first time. I looked around again and it was still my favourite to use.
The only slight quirk to this design is that there are no tabs to glue together. All the joins are made by placing edges next to each other and using sellotape. This means that it is important that the pieces are cut out accurately. The only place where i went slightly wrong on this was on the jawline. The line prints out as a very shallow 'V' but the joining piece is perfectly straight. It looks to be a slight error caused by the resolution of the printing rather than a mistake in the deisgn. If I built the model again I would check mating parts before cutting to make sure they will line up correctly when joined.
Learning from my first build of the skull I glued re-enforcing strips along the joins as I don't think the sellotape will stay stuck for too long.
Here is build in photographs.
All that is left now is to connect the LEDs up to a microcontroller, so they can be controlled from a switch or a sensor. I've also downloaded another project from Ravensblight that i'm going to have a go at.
About Me