Overview of
Puppetmaking Techniques
Written by Mike Brent
This is just a quick overview with links to more in-depth information, to
help newcomers figure out what kind of techniques they might want to persue
in their own puppetmaking endeavors. The info and links were collected from
all over this website, in an effort to make some sense of the chaos and try
to get some of this stuff ORGANIZED at last! It’s nice to have
a single page you can go to for massive collected link-goodness!
And if anyone knows of any other links, be it to threads inside this message
board or outside sites, by all means, please add them below! The more the
merrier. Also, corrections or additions to anything I said are welcome...
I don’t claim to know it all (though I might sometimes act like
it!).
ARMATURES
First up... what to put inside your puppet? There are several popular options
and many variations... as with any part of our strange, eclectic hobby, it
requires that you study various related skills and extract what knowledge
you can from them, add in some ingenuity and good old seat-of-the-pants MacGuyver-ing,
shake well and serve steaming hot.
The armature is the puppet’s skeleton... the framework on which it is built,
and that allows it to hold a pose without collapsing or falling over. The
only kind of puppets that don’t need an armature that I can think of
offhand would be very short, squat clay puppets that have either very thick
stumpy legs or no legs at all (snowman-style) and also very short or no arms.
If you animate action figures, they essentially are plastic armatures,
though might require additional support or various tricks to make them hold
a pose well enough for animation.
Armatures can range from very simple homemade ones made of wire to jointed
ones you can make yourself or kits that can be bought. They can also be custom
built for a premium price... a good option if you’re working on a pro-level
film and need the best armatures, or need them to fit your custom-designed
puppets. Of course, one of the best ways to learn about armatures is to open
the Puppetmaking forum and then Armatures and just start reading. Start with
whatever strikes your fancy... but due to the random nature of posting on
a message board, things frequently go off-topic, so often you’ll find great
information under a seemingly unrelated topic... we recommend that you devote
some time now and then to just random reading in the various forums.
ARMATURE KITS
Here are some suppliers who offer armature kits that you can assemble yourself,
generally with a good degree of customizability:
Animation
Supplies
La
Grange
Armaverse
Allied Armature
Armabenders
pro-quality armatures at Animateclay.com
WIRE ARMATURES
This is as easy as armature making gets, and you can go hog-wild in terms
of your own custom designs. Useful materials to have on hand for making wire
armatures include various types of epoxy putty, such as 5 minute or 20 minute
Devcon or similar plumber’s epoxy putties (available at local hardware stores),
Magic Sculpt or Apoxie Sculpt (through art suppliers like www.sculpt.com
).
Jurgen
Kling’s plug-in style kits at Marc Spess’s Animateclay if you’re
in America or
Jurgen’s
own site in Germany
My
Simple Puppet Fabrication tutorial
Nick
Hilligoss Making Puppets album
Marc
Spess guide to making wire armatures
Almaloy
aluminum armature wire at Mister Art...The 1/16” is a good general
size for puppet making. The larger sizes thay carry would be useful for other
purposes, but too big for most puppetmaking purposes.
McMaster Carr
Great all-around supplies website (with overnight shipping!). Excellent supplier
for all kinds of materials, including aluminum wire. Scroll to the bottom
of index, to section called Raw materials and Springs in the right
hand column.
Alec Tiranti
UK supplier of sculpting/moldmaking and casting materials, as well as wire
Here are some threads on this site with detailed description of techniques
for making wire armatures using the untwisted method, with the wires
wrapped and held together with silk thread:
Urethane
upholstery foam and puppet construction questions
Regarding
Kling\'s Plug-in armature kit and Liquid Latex
HOME-BREW ARMATURES
This refers to home-made armatures, generally of the open-hole balljoint variety,
which can be made in various ways using just a few tools most of you might
already have in the basement, like a drill press and grinder, some hand files,
and a propane torch.
Lionel Ivan Orozco’s excellent tutorials:
Open
Hole Balljoints
Drilling
Balls
Brazing
balls onto rods
...And
his massive Workshop page loaded down with more info than you
can ever hope to absorb
My
ball drilling jig demo as an addendum to Lionel's techniques.
HELPING HAND ARMATURES
Helping Hands..... yes, those little devices for solderimng with two alligator
clips and a magnifying glass... they have balljoints built in. Lots of people
have made armatures from them... here are a few helpful threads:
Helping
Hand Armature
Helping
Hands at harbor Freight
$30
Radio Shack B&S Armature
SWIVEL PEN HOLDERS
I'm not at all sure how you'd attach these together to turn them into a functioning
armature, but here's one way to get some functional ball & socket joints.
Swivel-jonted pen holders, like they have at the bank! I found a supplier
that stocks some:
Keysan
...And an assortment of random related links:
Monterey
Motion Graphics
Limanima
CUSTOM ARMATURE BUILDERS
Jeff
Taylor’s Taylordesign
John Wright
Model Making
Merrick Cheney’s
Mechinations
Gryphyn
Armatures
Clay-Mate
Wuchan Kim's armatures, used for some puppets in Corpse Bride
CLAY PUPPETS
The vast majority of newbies seem to have the (wrong) impression that most
or all stopmotion puppets are made of clay. We’re not entirely sure where
this impression comes from, but there’s another Newbie Guide chapter called
Claymation
and Stopmotion - what’s the difference? This should help answer
a lot of questions concerning what is and isn’t claymation.
We generally tell people that clay puppets are the easiest to make and the
hardest to animate, since you basically have to resculpt the puppet slightly
each time you move it, in order to remove fingerprints and/or tool marks,
and just to make the clay move the way you want it to rather than squish all
out of shape or tear. Clay puppets can range from the simplest ball or lump
of clay scooting around on a desk to extremely sophisticated constructions
like the Will Vinton or Aardman puppets.
Here’s an excellent article by Marc Spess on his Animateclay.com site, in
which he reverse-engineers (takes apart, for the lay-people out there)
some actual California Raisins puppets, examining their anatomy and you can
see just what went into making these “clay” puppets:
Reverse
Engineering a California Raisin Puppet
More
pictures of Marc’s reverse engineered raisin armature being built
And
another Vinton armature of an unknown puppet that Marc rescued from the scrap
heap
Here
is Marcs store, with puppetmaking supplies and instructional videos
URETHANE FOAM BUILDUP PUPPETS
Urethane foam is also known as cushion foam or upholstery foam. It’s generally
done by gluing foam onto an armature and shaping with scissors. A skin can
be made with liquid latex or the puppet can be covered with clothing sewn
from fabric. Heads can be made from hard materials like polymer clay (Super
Sculpey, Fimo) or wood, or cast from resin, and hands can be made by coating
wire with liquid latex. This is a good simple way to make puppets, and much
easier to animate than clay. It’s a great way to get started and develop the
skills needed to step up to foam latex or silicone puppetmaking in the future,
though these puppets are definitely suited to some great animation.
Newbie
Guide Chapter 3: Building up a Classic Stop-motion Monster by
Richard Svenssen
Purple
Mushroom ...And his site, with pictures of the puppets he’s made
this way
Richard
Svensson Stop Motion Puppet A very in-depth detailed pictorial
tutorial by Richard hosted at Marc’s website
Nick
Hilligoss’ Making Puppets album
The Puppetry
homepage
Urethane
foam supplier
Hands
keep looking lumpy when I dip them in rubber Pretty self-explanatory
thread
Monster
Makers - liquid latex and balloon rubber, slush casting latex,
latex paints etc
FOAM LATEX PUPPETS
Foam latex is great for making puppets... it features excellent compression
and stretch properties, and can be cast in a mold to duplicate a puppet sculpt
done in plasticene clay. It is commonly used in professional and often even
in upper-end amateur productions, but is pretty expensive and requires a steep
learning curve in order to master all the skills necessary. Foam latex comes
in kit form, consisting of 4 components (latex base, gelling agent, curing
agent and foaming agent). When you buy a kit from one of the suppliers listed
in the links below, you’ll recieve instructions for mixing and baking. Required
equipment for working with foam latex are a good quality scale, a dedicated
oven (you don’t want to use the same oven you cook in) and a kitchen mixer
like a Sunbeam or Kitchenaide. You can’t use a microwave, and
the recommended type is a convection oven. You also need to buy moldmaking
materials like Ultracal-30 or some other gypsum-based product (or some people
use fiberglass molds) and some waterbased clay for creating your mold walls.
Monstermakers.com
carries the waterbased clay in their Monster Shop under Clays.
...You want what’s called white clay... not the WED clay. This stuff
will dry out fast if you don’t keep it securely wrapped in plastic!
They also have UltraCal-30 on thier Gypsum Products page.
Nick
Hilligoss has a great tutorial on a relatively simple process
that doesn’t require injecting the foam.
At
Last, Foam Puppet Fabrication Explained! Tom Brierton’s article
Kathi
Zung Foam Latex 101 DVD
Suppliers for foam latex materials:
Burmanfoam.com
and
GMFoam.com
In the US
Screenface.com
In the UK
Michael Davy manufactures a simpler 3-part foam latex kit that is much more
forgiving than the more complex 4-part kits, but I don’t think it’s quite
as refined or supple in it’s finished form, meaning not as elastic or springy,
and a little stiffer:
Michael Davy 3-part
foam
...You’ll have to click on Products at the bottom of the page, and then on
Latex Products. Apparently you don’t need a scale , but still need a mixer
and oven to cure it. You can also order a cured sample to see how the fexibility
is.
CAUTION!!... do not use Michael Davy’s FOAM GELATINE
product for puppetmaking! It’s a prosthetic makeup FX material made
for facial appliances that will be discarded after a short time and replaced.
It’s gelatine... imagine trying to animate a puppet made of frothed Jell-O!!
Working with foam latex requires a considerable set of skills that must be
developed over time... such as sculpting and moldmaking. Before diving
in head first and investing in the expensive equipment and materials, it would
be wise to develop these skills and familiarize yourself with some of the
various techniques and materials involved. Links follow:
Dan
Perez has excellent tutorials on sculpting and moldmaking
(must register to join... membership is free):
The
Sculptors Forum
The
Prop Builders Molding and Casting Handbook A must-have book
EXPANDING URETHANE FOAM... or cold foam
Not as good as the more complex 4-component foam latex, but useful
for some aspects of puppetmaking. Cold foams are easier to use, generally
only having 2 components and not requiring an oven for curing. Most cold foams
are not self-skinning, meaning the outer surface will
be porous rather than smooth when you take it out of the mold, but there are
ways of combatting this. You can for instance make a skin of liquid latex
(not as flexible or stretchy as foam latex) inside the mold first and
then fill with the expanding cold urethane foam. Some people have made puppets
from cold expanding urethane foams with some success, but note that it will
generally wrinkle a lot worse than foam latex.
NOTE... MAKE SURE you get flexible urethane foam...
there is also a non-flexible urethane foam product that’s good for
making props or setpieces at times, but will not bend like rubber at all!!
Monstermakers
has two flexible urethane cold-foam products on their Urethane Casting page.
One is self-skinning, the other isn’t.
House
of Wane Here is a film with puppets made partially of cold foam.
Max Winston did this as a college project, and on the Making Of
page there are pictures showing the molds he made the girlscout puppet's arms
and the old man's head in. You can see the liquid latex painted into the molds
beforehand. In the film itself you can clearly see how the foam wrinkles a
little, but it works in a stylized cartoony film like this.
NEEDLE SCULPTING - NYLON PANTYHOSE METHOD
Thios is an alternative method that we've kicked around a little bit on the
boards, a completely different way to make puppets that doesn't involve sculpting
(well, except with a needle and thread that is) and casting. Also included
on some of these links is info on a related method called Felting -
creating soft clothlike forms from wads of wool roving. Can be used for making
thick cartoony clothing direclty on puppets, making hair (some characters
in Wallace and Gromit have felted hair) or even for making faces for some
kinds of teddy-bear-like puppets.
Softsculpt
article at StopMoWorks
Soft
Sculpt Puppet Build-up: Fiberfill n Nylon Stocking Thread
"puppet
size" CLOTHES WONT FIT!!!! ARGHHHHHH! Thread
SILICONE PUPPETS
I was able to dig up quite a few threads about silicone, here are a couple
of links:
Silicone
Puppets?
Enlarging/reducing
sculptures
How
to make Silicone hands
Armature
wire sticking through Silicone
RTV
into Plaster mold?
Cotton
Puppets - Miracle Silicone! (what?!!)
tinting
silicone
patching
& seaming silicone hands
Painting
silicone rubber puppets
silicone
RTV
silicon for puppets?
scaling/reducing
silivone castings?
Recyclyin
those old silicone molds
Silicone
and Vaselene
molds
for casting silicone puppets
silicone
skin over steel armatured scull
quick
fix for silicone hands
And a brief bit by Mister J that I decided to just transfer here entire:
"silicone based "skins" stretch a lot better than they compress, so foam
latex still has the edge in that category.
i personnally would not use dragon skin for stop mo its a liitle on the tough
side i would go with ecoflex30 and slacker to deaden the silicone, to be honest
the issue of stretch etc should not be an issue if the silicone is softened
enough, silicones like this when used with smooth on slacker or fxsmith deadener
do not compress at all. if made right it should displace as per natural flesh.
your skin does not compress if you look closely it is the tissue underneath
that displaces itself to allow the flex. i use platsil gel 10 and get superb
resultsi first form a thin encapsulating skin of neat platsil to all mold
surfaces then clamp the molds together. then a mix of platsil gel 10 with
20% deadener mixed in is injected into the mold. leave it for an hour and
a half then demold. use 1 part dish soap to 2 parts isopropyl alcohol as a
seperator or epoxy parfilm. hope this is of some help, check out smooth ons
website and also polytech."
"Ive recently done a few test with tinsil gel 10 and i have to say that for
puppet skins it is actually better than platsil, i use platsil as i do a lot
of animatronics and prosthetics and the tin cures are not at all safe for
use on the skin. tinsil however is really good for puppet skins having nearly
the same properties. the amount of deaener to tinsil for a nice puppet skin
is 3 parts deadener to one part silicone . for example if the slicone is a
50 -50 mix and you use say 30 grams of pt a and 30 grms pt b the amount of
deadener would be 90 grams any more results in a wobbly cured gell that will
be no good for a puppet skin."
Links to the products he mentioned:
Smooth-on
Silicone product page with the Ecoflex-30 and the Slacker both
listed
Polytek
page featuring the Platsil and the Deadener product
Dragon
Skin thread Here's a link to a thread (with Mister J's post at
the end of it) listing some of the plusses and minuses of Dragon Skin silicone