A new puppet means a new character design so I decided to make an older character with some strong facial features. I find designing side profiles a little tricky as it takes me a while to understand the skull structure.
The idea of this puppet is to have facial features that move and can be easily animated. We started off by creating armature from wire set with Milliput for the base, I decided to create wires for the eyebrows, mouth and ears. We then built up a head in plasticine.
This sculpture was such an improvement from my first attempt at Sasha which shows how much I learned from just one puppet. I used the method of using a lot of clay and then sculpting into it which was much easier.
We then created a mould for the latex puppet using our sculptures. We did this by placing the back of the head into soft clay, making sure that the seam was always at the widest point of the head, before pouring plaster over the face. This gave us our first half of the mould. We then coated this half of the mould with natural soap (so the two halves wouldn’t stick together) before placing the head inside again and covering the back of the head in plaster. Once this had set we had a reusable mould.
I forgot to take pictures but the next step was to coat both sides of the mould with latex to create a skin and make sure the details would come out in the final puppet. After a few coats, we taped the mould together and poured in more latex and swirled it around to get the skin coated. Finally we poured in some expandable foam and birthed our puppets!
I think my puppet came out looking really good but unfortunately the armature inside doesn’t work because it hasn’t clung onto the latex, and the foam didn’t seem to set properly inside. I will soon be attempting this again using the same mould but a slightly different technique for the mechanics, and hopefully it will work out!