Right, prepare yourself for what will most certainly turn out to be a pretty long - possibly tedious - post. I want to get through both the padding out of my fisherman character and my seagull, and then also the Latex work that went into them.
So a couple of weeks ago I got the padding out stage of my puppets done but I wanted to wait until the Latex parts were done before posting (I'm not entirely sure why but lets just roll with it shall we?!). To pad out firstly I had to pad the "hard" parts of the body using hard foam, these include areas such as the chest and hips, as you don't want those parts getting all squished when you're animating as it just looks weird. How I like to think about it is adding a solid pair of pants and solid sort of cropped vest to my character. I glued these parts on using two part epoxy glue - making sure I left holes for the rigging points to poke on through.
Once the solid parts were glued on I then had to glue on the soft foam onto the areas where the joints or parts need to flex. I find cutting chunks to roughly the right shape then gluing them on before trimming to the required shape is the best way of going about padding the soft areas. For this I used a different glue, one that dries strong but still allows movement.
When the mid section was covered I then went about covering it in a sort of foam jumper. First, I made a kind of vest and then added some sleeves, but this is all meant to be the fisherman's *ahem* slightly plumper frame shall we say. It may need to get trimmed down though towards the end, depending on how thick the jumper comes out.
I then went and padded out half the legs - the wellies will add to the bottom section when made. The seagull was then padded out in the same sort of way, though the whole of his body is soft foam and his head is hard foam.
Okay, sorry to drag the post on but I'll just quickly run through the Latex areas of the characters - I've already told you how I made the hands here, and the rest is all a similar sort of process except for that they were made using just a one part mould (that may not be the technical term but ahh well) rather than a two part mould.
First things first I got the parts for Latexing sculpted out using Plasticine. By the by, this is my second attempt at the seagulls legs as I sculpted them before and then made the wrong type of mould, wasting like a week of work in the process - woe is me!!
When the sculpts were done and smoothed down with talcum powder it was then time to make the moulds. I made a box around the the sculpts using some plastic sheets and held them in place with copious amounts of tape and clay to stop any leaks when the plaster was poured on.
It was then time to pour the plaster on, making sure everything was smothered in Vaseline first of course. When everything was dry it was then time to take out the Plasticine sculpts.
When all the Plasticine was out it was time to clean the moulds before adding layer after tedious layer of precoloured Latex. It was then time to put the armatures in the mould before chucking a load more Latex in afterwards. The feet needed padding out a little first but after that they were good to go.
After a day of drying and then another day of drying after I had to redo the legs, my Latex parts were done! Huzzahh!!
This is the legs when they first came out the mould before I redid them!
And here - you lovely patient person, you! - are my puppets as they are now, with all the Latex parts and padding all on.
Thanks for taking a look, more to come soon!
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