Thursday, May 27, 2010

Something a little different

Over the past few months I've been teaching a class on puppetry to middle school students. During this class I wanted to teach some of the students how to make hand/glove puppets. One would think these would be super simple considering the stuff I've been doing recently but it wasn't quite so. Hand puppets have their own nuances and their own type of locomotion. Also, the type of hand puppet I made requires sculpting skills as well. Luckily, my wonderful wife was on hand to give me a crash course. Using a styrofoam ball as an armature, I built up my sculpture using paper clay. The ball had a good sized hole cut in it so that the finger of the glove (or neck) could be stuck to it. I'll do another post at some point documenting the next hand puppet I make so I can show the process visually.

Anywho, here is the little guy I came up with. His name is Fuzzbucket. You may have seen a pic of him in an earlier post of a pen and ink drawing I did. Hopefully this won't be the last you see of him. In fact, it may be just the beginning :)

As I mentioned earlier, his head is made out of a styrofoam ball with clay sculpted on top of it. The hair is part of a fuzzy boa and the body is hand and machine sewn using anti pil fleece.



Next time I'll show some video of how these type of puppets move.

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