Stop-Motion Puppet Process

To start, we had to draw our character roughly 20 cm in height. There was a mixup in comunication between the tutors and the ceramics technician and it turns out 20 cm should have been the minimum, as smaller puppets ended up getting too thick with all the bulking. Luckily, as my design was quite simple I could still use it.

We then drew a skeleton onto the drawing. I found it quite hard visualising where the skeleton should go, specifically with the shoulders and hips. I ended up getting a lot of feedback for those parts. In hindsight, I should have made the hips higher up. In addition to this, as my character was hunched over, I had to make the armature's neck extend upwards to allow for that bend. A side profile would have helped a lot with getting this much more accurate.

We then used wire and twisted it to create the armature, starting by doing the head, body, shoulders and hips with one piece of wire. We then created the arms and legs by feeding the wire through the loops at the shoulders and hips.

WWW?:

• I thought I was very neat and clean with the twisting of the wire at this stage
• The armature fit inside my scale drawing very well, giving me enough room for the bulking
• The character was pretty symmetrical 
• It already resembles my character
• It was able to stand up

To improve:

• The arms were a little too short
• The legs weren't even in height and therefore I had to bend one of the feet earlier, resulting in them being different sizes
• I kept cutting off too little armature wire, meaning it wouldn't be enough to make the head and body, therefore I had to use a new piece resulting in waste
• The hunched neck could have been cleaner

Once the armature putty had dried, we created foam padding for everywhere the armature shouldn't bend (the bones). As my character had such short legs and arms, I only used one foam piece for each limb instead of two, to increase it's moveability.

I found this step very time consuming, as I wanted the pieces to be as symmetrical and clean as possible to make it easier for the later stages. The body was particularly challenging, as I couldn't visualise how it would look, therefore I made a quick plasticine maquette:

Overrall, I think this stage went very well despite taking me a long time. I think all the pieces were well sculpted and resembled my character's shapes successfully. I think that the body as a whole is too long, however that's a problem from the armature stage that's followed through.

Next, I wrapped the model in this stretchy cloth and tape to allow the plasticine to stick to something rather than the wire and foam. The goal for this stage was to make sure everything was covered and tightly, because if the cloth was a little bit loose the plasticine would drag it down and distort the model.

This stage was very hard and I didn't enjoy it. The purple tape worked by sticking to itself, however my model was so thick that I could only use it as the joints, therefore I had to work out a way to cover the larger areas while finishing at the thinner joints to seal off. This step took me ages, and I feel I lost some of that clean form especially in the arms and legs. The cloth was pretty tight however, which was good. 

In this stage, I had to fill in the middle section somehow. I found that just having cloth covering the outside of it wouldn't hold the plasticine well, amd therefore had to fill it in by wrapping cloth around it. This resulted in the puppet not being able to bend in the middle as much anymore.

The final stage was to add plasticine to the model. As my character is naked, I only needed one colour, however I had to mix that colour. It was reccommended that I mix a large amount of that colour to ensure that the skin stays the same shade throughout, however this took me hours of mixing, and even then there wasn't enough. I decided to just use that and then mix more as I went. 

This stage was fun as you could see the character start to take shape, however because my character was so thick, it lost all functionality. The plasticine made it so that the character can't move anymore without tearing. In addition to this, I think the torso is way too long, and the arms are quite ugly looking. The hip area is also ugly, and doesn't flow from leg to body successfully. I think most of these problems come from the armature and cloth wrapping stage, however it showed me that thick limbs are very hard to create for a stop motion puppet. 

This process was very useful in showing me the steps, and I learnt a lot from it. Despite my puppet being unusable for stop motion, I can still use it as a 3D reference to help me in drawing my character from different angles and perspectives.