Puppet making was an incredibly good surprise.
My peers and I had to pick a subject to study until the end of unit 1 between 2D, 3D or stop-motion animation. Before coming to CSM, I didn’t even consider puppet making or stop-motion animation as career paths. I made my decision based on what the subject had to offer and puppet making seemed like the most complete one in current Covid times. Online learning has been exhausting. Even though everyone is doing their best, staying at home staring at a computer the whole day with zero social interaction is terrible!
Following all Covid guidelines, Tuesday’s puppet making class was the most fun I’ve had in a good while! Even though I love working digitally, getting my hands dirty was something I didn’t know I needed.
We began a long but very productive day by analysing the character we designed previously for class and how its construction would go.
We began by twisting 3 pieces of soft wire for each leg and each arm. After placing them over the original character drawing, these were attached by screwing them in through electrical connectors. Glue was used to make sure these wouldn’t come off easily.
Thankfully, my armature could stand perfectly.
The next step was to mix miliput epoxy putty that would be moulded around where the limbs would be. Posteriorly, I cut two pieces of foam shaped as my character’s torso- one for the front and another one for the back. I glued them in without letting glue get to the electrical connectors so I could easily replace the arms and legs if these were to break.
The body structure was now complete and I proceeded to shape the head. Using a harder block of foam, I carved the shape of a cloud, using drawn reference of the front and side of my cloud character. Needless to say I spent more time cleaning up than I did carving.
At the end of the day I had two ripped gloves, one open finger, one armature and one foam cloud head! What a day.