ready or nuts here i am

Arms on the drying rack #puppetbuilding #stopmotion #wip

by the way some Cool Stuff is happening :9

Makin’ my way downtown #wip #stopmotion #puppetfeet

Sue 2.0 is all foamed up!!! She’s better constructed (with copper wire reinforcing a smaller gauge of aluminum wire), faster to build (started her last night, finished the final touches on her foam just a few minutes ago), better at balancing (she’s completely unsupported in all of these)….

…AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFOREEEEEEEEE

LONG LIVE SUE 2.0

Starting over from scratch after learning about breaking armatures… Sue 2.0 is taking shape #stopmotion #puppetmaking #wip #learnfromyourmistakes

Since I’ve been posting about my puppet-building escapades, I thought I might as well post my plans I’ve made!

I originally had the idea for this puppet in spring 2015 or so, and I sketched up the first drawing on the left. It was just for a personal idea at that point, and kind of a pipe dream. Then this semester (Spring 2016) I started a stop-motion class, and our final project is to build and animate a character in a set that we’ve made; and so I jumped at the chance to make my Sue puppet a reality! Therefore I made the second drawing on the right, and I am using it as my layout/plan for fabricating the current puppet I’m working on.

The drawing on the right is to scale, by the way - Sue is going to be about 8 inches tall when finished, and so that’s how big that drawing is!

So as I was working on foaming last night, I thought it would be a good idea to take pictures of my process! As a disclaimer - this is the first stop motion puppet I’ve built, so don’t take my process as the end-all be-all. There are definitely mistakes and pitfalls in my process, as illustrated here with her arm coming off, but feel free to take inspiration or learn from this as I do it!

Anyways - I took inspiration from stop-mo artist Christiane Cegavske’s process from looking at her blog for the foaming process. I took pieces of regular green foam and hot glued them to the apoxie parts of my armature (the grey stuff on the wires in the first few pictures) while referencing my layout drawing. Then I took a pair of scissors and sculpted the foam roughly to get it into the shape I wanted! I also took some of the foam scraps from that process and used them to pad out places where I wanted more mass/fix places where I’d taken too much away.

And then, after I got her all foamed, I started to file down the sharp, cut-wire ends of her fingers and toes - and that’s when her arm fell off, because the wire had gotten too brittle from being bent. Whoops. I ended up performing triage and just cutting the arm off while I was filing, and then I went back and used apoxie to reattach her arm. Normally this wouldn’t really fly, but I think it’ll work out since she’s a pretty lopsided puppet by design. lol

Anyways - the pic on the yellow drawing pad is one I just took this morning! The apoxie has dried and her arm is firmly back in place. Woo! Now to get fabric for her skin and such!!!!

Pics from last night - got the foaming done!! These were taken right before I accidentally snapped her arm off, tho. #whoops #puppetmaking #wip #stopmotion

Last night, and right now! #puppetmaking #stopmotion #wip #SheLives