One of Taboo's distinguishing features is her tail, and I already had a pretty spiffy spine full of pointy bits, so I pretty much had to make a tail. A lot of what I'd seen online, though, was thick, fleshy tails made of cloth and stuffing, and that didn't seem right for a whip-like, spiny tail. The online tail tutorials all mentioned using heavy gauge wire for shape and rigidity, so I started looking at beads as a way to thread narrower, bone-like items onto a tail. Couldn't really find anything pre-made that looked decent and wasn't very heavy - I did consider using actual bone at one point, but even 3' of small animal tail bones gets pretty heavy - so I started looking for ways to make it myself.
In my searches, I ran across foam clay, something I'd never heard of before but that looked promising. It's basically a play-doh-like clay, but when it dries, it turns into eva foam - lightweight and flexible. That seemed pretty much like what I was after, so I bought a small tub of it and sat down to work. It takes 2-3 days for the clay to dry, so I had to balance between trying out shapes and sizes vs not taking forever in the trial phase. I made a few shapes, to get the size and general look down, and set them down on the table to dry.
Came back a day later to find that that spike on the left one was overbalancing it, and it was slowly becoming lopsided, so I grabbed a longer piece of wire and a pants hanger, and voila! Tail bone drying station!
The shape seemed pretty good, so I made a couple more and hung them up to dry, too. The clay starts to dry out a bit as you work it; you get maybe 10-20 minutes before it starts showing creases and cracks like in the first picture. After a couple dry-looking tail bones, however, I learned that you can smooth some water over it to make it stop cracking, and the rest of the bones looked much nicer. After this batch dried fully, I strung them on a thicker piece of wire and dang if it didn't look pretty good.
A couple more session got me all the tail bones I needed, but what to make for an endpiece? Some experimenting with paper gave me the above shape, and after a couple failed attempts, I got a decent shape out of the foam. It was kind of unweildy to dry, though, and threading it onto wire didn't work; it was so end-heavy that it was deforming in just a few minutes - not gonna work with a 3 day dry time. So, with wet clay in hand, I grabbed some nearby foam and string, and made a little hammock to support it while it dried.
It worked surprisingly well, only leaving a slight impression of the foam on the clay which isn't noticeable unless you're REALLY close. I'm slowly getting better with leaving perfectionism behind in favor of "if they're close enough to see that, they're close enough to bonk." Or in Taboo's case, stab with a tail. I was a little concerned that the endpiece wasn't pointy enough, but that's the best I could get, so I let it go.
Once I had all the pieces, it was time to seal and paint. After watching a couple foam clay videos, I learned that even after drying, the foam clay basically melts in water. Not instantly, but I didn't want to have to worry about random spills or bad weather, so I put two coats of glue on each piece, just to be safe. I'd initially started out painting half of each bone, then setting it down to dry, but they're not completely flat and they kept falling over and marring the glue. Turns out that with a little bending, pants hangers work great as painting stations, too:
To make them match the claws, and because acrylic paint is also not waterproof, I finished them with a coat of resolene acrylic sealer. Let all that dry, and strung it together on the thicker wire, and ta da! A not-too-bad-looking tail!
But how to connect it? And how to make sure it doesn't show the silver metal when I bend it? Hm... To be continued.
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