Working at home--making puppets

At college a Friday is a day for catching up with work. For the past couple of weeks I have been using each Friday to stay at home and work on more sculptural works.. things that I cant really leave around the studio. The first thing I started working on was a wooden boat! I have a unit which is basically a story about a fisherman being cursed by a mermaid.. something like that. I had the idea to try and make a stop motion movie! I still had parts of my broken bed from my last unit so I worked out the sizes and glued them together (shown in the picture below). 

I was trying to think about the size of 

the characters and obviously the height 

of the 'water'. It wouldn't be real water 

but it would be a material which 

conveys the idea of water. 

I then made another side (exact same size) and a bottom to hold both sides and the front together. As you can see in the picture on the right -> I planned out my next steps by drawing onto the picture which I took on my phone. Unfortunately it ended up just staying as a plan.. I liked the whole stop motion animation idea but I have a time limit to finish this unit and to actually make all the characters and props, plus actually filming it would take way too long! So I did in fact give up on this approach. 

As I was working on the same unit (looking at different artists and methods of telling stories- unit= Narrative Image Making) I came across a kids show which was based around a puppet called Elmo. It really got me thinking.. Maybe I could make my own? It felt similar to stop motion in the sense that it can be recorded and watched over again so I got to it. I got two templates from the internet.. 1 hand and 1 round head. 

I cut out the shapes in some underlay over-cut and stuck all the edges together with hot glue. I then cut up an old fleece which was laying in the cupboard (hopefully wasn't in use:O) and then glued that to the head sculpt. Hand sewing in places. I then made a body from yet again more underlay and covered it with fleece.

 Covering the hands was
definitely the
hardest part! Way
too fiddly. I also
used the glue gun
 for that and attached the hands to the body with loose fleece as arms.

The eyes (for now) are just round pieces of paper with black pen for pupils but I may use something like a white ping pong ball or something! The mouth of the puppet was the reverse side of the underlay cut into a slightly more rounded shape.

Final Outcome- 

I'm genuinely pleased with the outcome of this puppet! I haven't entirely finished as I do still need to add small details to it but right now I am really happy with it. I'm possibly thinking of taking this route now.. making a short movie using the puppets (making more soon-probably this Friday as it is the only day I can really dedicate to getting these things done!) but ill see how it goes.. something else might come up but until then I feel like this is what I'm going to do! :))