BA3a Personal Showcase : Puppet Fabrification - The Making of Claude the Many Faced Clown

I started off with a basic armature which I based off my final character design.

I then went on to foam the puppet, giving him a tiny waist and big hips to make it seem like the material puffs out.

I made the Shakespearean collar by following a basic pattern online. I used a piece of cardboard to hold the fabric together and used a mix of fabric glue and stitching to give it the ruffled effect.

I first attempted to carve the head out a polystyrene ball, and much to no ones surprise, it didn't work at all. I wanted to use it for a head because it is light weight and it has worked well with puppets I have made in the past. However, the head for this puppet is a more interesting shape than one I have made before.

These lead me to consider other materials I could use. I decided to try modelling clay which allowed me to have much more freedom and ease when sculpting this puppet. It also meant that I could easily paint it afterwards. I really enjoyed working with this material and would use it again in the future.

Next I moved on to working on his masks. In total I made 11 different faces for this character.

The idea behind this is to look at a very simplified version of replacement animation which is used in a lot of stop motion animations. The idea is basically replace elements of the puppets face to allow it to have several different emotions and sometimes lip sync.

This was my first attempt at something like this so I didn't want to make it too complicated for myself. However I really enjoyed the process of making these and look like the experiment with it further in the future.

I started by covering the head in cling film so that the paint wouldn't get damaged by the wet clay.

I then flattened out a small piece of clay and push it onto the head. This so I would know where to put the eyes and also so I could mould it to the head, meaning the mask would stay on by itself when dry.

Then I added a nose and gave the masks an expression so that wouldn't all look exactly the same. I wanted to show as much diversity as I could while still making them fit on the head.

I then painted each of the masks individually, trying to focus on which colours would suit each expression e.g., blue for a sad face. I didn't want any two masks to look the same.

Props

Originally I had planned to make a tiny suitcase for this character to take his masks around in. However I thought that using a carry case would be much more effective. I made this out of a box which a super glued together. I then covered it with an old shirt I had. After I added pins at the end of the box to act as a clasp and added buttons to act as wheels.

It ended up looking a lot better than I thought it was going to considering it was a last minute change and I had to work with what I had. I should have planned this part of the character more thoroughly and will consider elements like this in the future.