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Brought to you by Artifex Kindred
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Materials List:
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I'm experimenting different approaches to making puppets, from my last attempt using polymer clay and attaching the limbs with hooks. I was unimpressed with the result - what was missing was the joints. By researching on every corner of the internet, I managed to find some resources to guide me through the process. The issue with that is, different artists use different methods to making their dolls and I may have got them jumbled up.
There are courses online that have a full pack of resources to successfully make a doll. I'm a cheap skate though so I tried to find ways around getting the information for free. I made a template for the body shape using Adobe Illustrator, making sure to incorporate the ball joints into it. The fault I made in this stage was neglecting to consider the thickness of the clay around the ball, which resulted in the balls being too big for the limbs. This has impacted on the final presentation of the doll. Using the template as reference, I sculpted each body part. I bought a circle template from Hobbycraft to sculpt my ball joints perfectly to size - this was harder than I expected it would be. Once the parts were dry (after a day or so), I hollowed them out (in hindsight, I didn't need to do this). I cut the legs and arms up into three pieces, the middle piece being the knee/elbow joint - adding the ball joints. Once all the joints were in the right places, I left them all to dry again. With a drill, I made a channel that ran through all the pieces and threaded elastic cord through it all. The feet and hands needed something to hook the elastic onto, so I screwed loops onto the joints. The head was cut into two pieces, so I can swap faces if the doll were to be used as a stop motion animation puppet. I glued some strong magnets into the front and back head plates as a means of attaching/detaching the face. The end result is functional and I have learned a lot during the process. |