For a 3 amigos party I want to make a piñata of the Amigo who get’s stuck hanging over El Guapo’s Party (in the movie).. thinking will use different shaped balloons/paper mache for head body & limbs.. but wondering about joining the limbs to the body & decoration?
Answer from Piñata Boy
There are a number of different ways you can do this, depending on the shapes of the pieces and how they’re coming together. If you’re joining two round pieces, such as a head and a body, the balloons come together and only touch at one small point, so it’s hard to get a good, strong connection between them unless you find a way to make them touch over a wider area. One way to do this is to cut a circular hole in one piece, say the top of the body, and then rest the head on the hole. Now instead of touching at one point, the two pieces are in contact over the entire circumference of the circle. Tape them together with masking tape then cement over the joint with a few layers of papier mâché. You can see how I did this to make the skull out of two balloons on the Pirates of the Caribbean piñata.
If you don’t want the head to sink into the shoulders, another way to join them is to create a “neck” out of thin cardboard. Just get a strip of thin cardboard, curl it into a circle, and tape the ends in place. Then tape the neck onto the top of the body, and rest the head on top. Tape the head in place and cement over it with papier mâché. The connecting piece can be as long or short as you need, and have a diameter that is as narrow or as wide as you need, so there’s a lot of flexibility in making this kind of connection.
If you’re attaching an arm to a body, you’ll want a different method to connect them. Simply taping a long, cylindrical arm piece onto the body and trying to papier mâché over it usually doesn’t work very well because the taped joint is too floppy. But you can cut parallel snips in the end of the arm piece where it attaches to the body, then fold the snips outward like petals on a flower. Then tape the petals down onto the body and you’ll have a much sturdier connection to papier mâché in place. You can see an example of this where I attached the legs to the spider on the Tarantula piñata. In this case I only made two flaps, but for a larger limb made from papier mâché you’ll probably want to make more than two. The Tarantula piñata also shows how I attached the two body parts by making a cutout section where one piece fits into the other, like I mentioned earlier.
So the bottom line is that to attach two body pieces, you want to find a way to have them touch over a greater surface area, tape them in place, and then cement the over that area with papier mâché.
I hope this helps. Good luck!