Sally was interested in the plasticine model I made of the fruitbat, so I have added this photo to the set. You can click to see it enlarged in different sizes. The yellow pins mark the performer’s eyes, and the black spot on the leg, their feet.
Meanwhile, Amy has given me Best Flying Rodent in an Insupportable Role – lol! Thanks, Amy.
Making this huge Fruit Batman character for The Fool Factory has been the thing keeping me so busy last month. The wingspan is 6-7 metres, and it is a stilt-walking character. The wings are articulated, and it has animatronic eyes and ears, but it was my brief to build the creature around those supplied elements. He is now in Adelaide, doing some performances in the streets during the Fringe Festival.
I’ve made a set of photos that show some of the making process. And there are some more stills and a couple of quicktimes on the Fool Factory’s new site. I was particularly happy with the head:
The Fool Factory‘s Rock & Roll Rascals, Big Bad Ted and Long Tall Sally rock it up during this year’s Floriade in Canberra. I made Ted’s winklepickers and Sal’s legs and shoes.
I was flipping around the channels on the TV a few minutes ago trying to find CNN. (This sounds nonchalant, but it really means beating the living daylights out of the remote to make it work). Instead, I landed up on the Information Channel – I have no idea what this usually shows, I will have to ask the kids – and much to my surprise it was showing tumblegum.com, a pilot show that I helped make puppets for in 1999. My puppet was Spike, the larrikin goanna, played beautifully by Peter Wilson, Australia’s most outstanding puppeteer. Here’s Spike on location at Googong Dam:
He was about 6 feet long, and had huge claws made from chopping board plastic (which incidentally is a very useful material, being relatively strong and soft to work). I have pictures of him lolling immodestly on our trampoline in the sun while his paint dried.
As far as I know the show never made it beyond the one-off pilot, though it was marketed with great optimism overseas at Cannes and in China, so it was unexpected and good to see it at least getting a showing. As a puppet maker, you have to get used to the reality that the time it takes to create a puppet is usually quite out of proportion to the time it’s actually on stage or screen. So it’s a nice feeling when their lives are extended into another season, or the show tours here or overseas for some years to come.
I’ve been busy making two of those poseable wooden manikins that artists use to draw from into small puppet versions of two actors, a man and a woman. Its been fiddly, since to make the proportions right, I had change the shapes of the bodies, and the length of the limbs, which in turn means undoing the joints and shortening some of the springs that tension them . Really, the manikins are quite odd around the hips. I read that these deluxe guys have a lot more movement than the wooden ones, but they just make me laugh! And the woman is frightening!
Its a strange range of other poseable figures you can get supposedly to draw from. Horses, dinosaurs and giraffes are carried by our local art store. I know people buy them just because they are cool, but I like to imagine instead that there is a thriving subculture of ‘giraffe artists’ for instance.
I’m not participating in the Month of Softies this time. Partly I’ve been short on time, but I also wasn’t inspired. And while I think moving it to Flickr was more than understandable, I find that I feel differently about it over there. I’m not sure why.
My husband’s grandfather had a wide notion of what might be fixed with paint, and it got more extensive as he got older, until he was happily fixing stains in upholstery and carpets with dabs of paint. I’ve been thinking about him today, because I have been spraypainting a border pattern onto a large piece of carpet which is to be used in a play. The design was cut as a stencil:
Having seen Ronnie Burkett‘s amazing Tinka’s New Dress in its last season at the Melbourne Festival in 2002, and heard him speak so inspiringly at the Puppetry Summit there at the same time, I was interested to see Burkett’s article on paper mache (via Puppetry News and Views).
The article talks about recipes for making one’s own paper mache pulp, and the various situations they are useful for, but Burkett also says that much of the time he now uses a commercial papier mache pulp called Celluclay. I thought it would be ideal for a court jester’s marrotte that I was making, but its hard to come by here, so I tried Mix-It, which is made in Victoria. When I tried an instant paper pulp before many years ago, it was quite lumpy, but this mix turned out to be nice and smooth to work, and dried really hard and white.
Dave Riley is a mask-maker, puppeteer and playwright based in Brisbane. His Mask Studio tutorials have been of great help to me a number of times – thanks Dave! There are two mask tutorials:
The felt method is really interesting. It involves soaking the felt in white glue and then moulding it to shape rather like working leather. There are then different finishes to experiment with, including paint, and leather gloss and polish. The result is a very light strong mask.
A few years ago when I first tried it and made a series of animal masks, I built on a paper mache base because I wasn’t sure it would be strong enough otherwise, but recently in making some smaller masks for Hidden Corners’ ‘See Beneath’, I was more confident in using the felt by itself, with a muslin/white glue backing to make the inside comfortable and strong.
The seaweed fronds had a little extra strengthening, just because the shape was not intrinsically strong like the shell. The fishy mask was done a little differently, without felt because I wanted finer detail. It is carved quite thinly out of styrofoam, and has several layers of muslin and white glue to give it strength.
These have a water-based polymer gloss varnish added to the paint, which kind of plasticizes them.
