Head and neck building

For the head I use the same hobby clay as I used on the body. It was important to make a hole at the bottom for the neck to join. The same problem occurred with sticking the skin clay together with the hobby clay. It kept falling off. Here I also tried adding some tinfoil between the layers. It helped but I would not recommend it as it became a problem later. The skin clay is called sculpy and when the head was sculpted I baked it. The problem I mentioned before was that when the clay got harden and after animating with it the clay lost contact with tinfoil. Sadly, I first found out about this problem when I made the second head as the first head broke. I'll show and write more about fixes on head and hands in another post.        

When the head was done I moved on to the neck. The method both armature and materials I used do not hold up very well so I won't describe too much of it. I don't recommend it. However, I used the same mold clay as with the hands and added very little acrylic colour to mix in and backed it in the oven. At the end I decided to hide the neck with fabric. 

Fixing hands, hair and head

For the hands I made 3 different ones. The second par where made the same way as the first ones, mainly because I did not know which other method I should use, and I did not feel sure using the silicone method. It also takes a long time to make, but it's probably the best way to go. For the new hands I added some acrylic paint to the clay. Trying to match the skin tone of her face. It's not easy to find the same colour because when you bake it, it becomes much darker and more towards one of the mixed colours. For example, I had yellow, red and blue in the mix and when I baked it, it became much more yellow than the actual colour I mixed. For this process you need a lot of patience, or like me: "I don't care, it's just hands and I'm not a professional" :) However after a couple of weeks they got too dry and began to crack. 

The last pair of hands I made, I used Latex milk. I forgot to take pictures of the process only one, because I was too annoyed with Annabelle at that time. However, I'll try to explain it to those who finds this interesting. The armature hand was made the same way as before, but this time I finally got hold of some Milliput and added it around the places I wanted to be more solid. However, I do not recommend adding the Milliput on the fingertips for this method with Latex milk, the milliput will break off. When The milliput had dried I dipped the hands into a bowl of Latex milk and dried them with a hair dryer. This I did over and over again till I was happy with the volume of the hands. When they are done you add some cornflour to them and carefully brush it off. It will make them less sticky. I did try to add some acrylic paint to the latex, but that was a bad idea, it made these small clumps of paint and I mainly did it because the latex is see-through so I thought by adding colour it would make the colour thicker. Which it did not. However, I really liked the result because it did not become dry and they where a bit easier to work with.     

Everything is not easy and especially when you don't know anything. When I made the hair for the head I decided to use same technique as with the hands. I used the mold sculpy, added some colour to make it brown, but if you add too much colour it becomes too dry after backing. Even before baking the consistency becomes a bit dry and falls apart. This is the result:   

I used acrylic paint to mix with the sculpy which makes it dry, so instead I got some help and he mixed some food colour into it and the scuply kept its moist. However, after animating with if for a month it becomes a bit dry, but with the other hair it only lasted a weekend.   

To create the hair I used a solid backed mold made from sculpy, which I got help with. It would help me shape the braid I wanted as it was too difficult to braid it. 

 

Final result of hair and new head. For the new head I used the exact same method as the first head. This is the head I used for all of my animations and later on I found out that the tinfoil method did not work as expected. 

Final Puppet

Okay, puppet is done and ready for some animation. As you can see I made a little collar for her neck to hide it and this is the old head and hands. 

Materials

Her are some of the main materials I used making my puppet. 

 

                   For hands, neck and hair                                                      For head

For props

  

For fabric use                                                      For metal components

    

For solid areas                                                        For hands

                                    For hair, neck and hands (food colour seems to be a good match)                              

For table

Green screen room

As a part of my time at Open Workshop I borrowed their green screen room to make all of my animations. I also lent a table and patched it up before animating. To fill the holes I used some cast like material. When it was dry I polished the surface with sandpaper and repeated the process three times. Finally I painted it with white colour to times.

        

When the table was ready I needed to get familiar with the whole tiedown system. Drill a hole and stick up the metal tiedown into the hole and tie it together with the hole in the armature foot. Fairly easy right? No. Make sure you have two of the one I show in the picture. I only had one and had to one another one with out the curve at the end which was really difficult to work with.   

     

  

As one of my animation assignments I wanted to make a jump, but while I was building her I realised the armature did not have a rig system to make it 'fly'. I tried a solution, but it did not work at all so instead I together with my sweet parents build a bigger rig with fish wire and wood. It almost became a marionette puppet. It was a bit tricky to handle but it worked and I was really happy with the result.