Puppet Galore

Well after a long (and rather gluey) few weeks my little puppet is nearly finished, woop! Admittedly she still looks a bit terriying, but she now has hair and her decency is covered with some clothes I made out of some old clothes, so shes not too bad :)

After I had finished constructing the main bits of the armature, I got to work fashioning some hands made out of aluminium wire which proved to be a lot trickier than anticipated! The hands had to made from one long piece of wire to prevent separate parts coming loose, and it was extremely fiddly trying to twist the individual fingers. But after many attempts, lots of tea and an excessive amount of cursing I managed to make something that looked like hands...ish. Once I had attatched the hands to the forearms using araldite glue, I spent some time sticking pieces of sponge to the wire areas that were not going to be covered by clothes and to pad out thinner areas of the puppet.

By this point the armature was fully constructed and ready to be painted. I started off by giving the body a thin coat of a flesh coloured paint, including a wash on the foam sections, and then painted on the mouth to make her look a bit more human. If I had more time on this project, I would have liked to make replacement mouths to give more freedom with her expressions. But the deadline is looming, so I have just stuck with replacement eyes and possibly replacement eyebrows.

For the hair, I cut lengths of a reddish-brown thin wool and stuck it on strand by strand over a couple of layers so it didn't look too thin. I even gave her a cheeky lil fridge to give her a bit of character. Im pretty pleased with the results, but I was a bit messy with the glue so it looks like she has a bit of a crusty scalp!

To make my puppet feel a little less embarressed, I made her some clothes by cutting sections out of some old clothes and glued them together to make a simple top and skirt. I made sure I didn't glue the clothes directly onto her just incase I wanted to change them, but so far they are looking ok! The next step is some socks and shoes, not sure how I'm going to do them but I could always paint some on... hmm, we shall see. Here are some piccies of the puppet, sorry there are so many, I've been a bit over-enthusiastic with my camera! :s