I'm starting to get excited about this little puppet project, looking forward to figuring out how best to make it and getting my boys involved in designing their own ones too. I'm going to start with the Earl of Rone and see if he holds me long enough... before i hold him! I'm also considering the Biddenden Maids (Mary & Elizabeth Chulkhurst)
... and the Brede Ogre (Sir Goddard Oxenbridge, who I've already drawn before
here and made a
pot of... which needs to be re-made, better). These characters are more local, Kent and East Sussex.... whereas the Earl is Devon based. I've already had a crack at him in
clay (which some of you may remember), he's still sitting up on that shelf waiting for me to get my act together! Anyway, for this I'm going to try and keep things relatively simple technically and make a glove puppet, the full body variety with little dangling legs. I have a small collection of these that i found in town several years ago, they used to hang in my home studio before it became jakki's dumping ground, sorry... workspace! I need to re-house them in a finer setting. They have fantastic papier mache heads, which have been cut off a form and SEWN back together, it's a beautiful scar. A couple of them have even found their way into my work, here are the wolf and the fox as part of my Wish List set.
 |
| This is going to be the basic model for my Earl |
 |
| Wolf, with that great jaw scar/stitches |
 |
hopefully this wish becomes clearer now you can see
how the original is stringed up! |
 |
| whereas this one just runs on the basic premise of a wolf being bad |
Those glove-puppets were a lucky find. And how extraordinary that the maker sewed the papier mâché heads back together after removing them from the 'form'. What an engagingly eccentric solution!
ReplyDeletethis looks fantastic, i'm very curious how one would manage the conjoined twins, but all your subjects are fascinating....i love that scar-line, too!
ReplyDeleteHi Zoe and Clive, it's great to hear two new voices on the blog. It was starting to get a bit devoid of comments and interactions. It reminds me how important it is for me to leave some comments on all the great blogs i drop in on too.
ReplyDeleteZoe, i'm not sure if I'd do the twins as two puppets joined together, or just the one. I might have to make them just to find out!