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I'm finally getting around to posting the pics of my latest puppet. I had finished it a while ago, but I wasn't really sure whether it was 'finished' enough. It needed something; ultimately I decided it didn't.

Be warned - this is a long post!

Anyway, here's the final product:

I've always wanted to try making a 'muppet'-style puppet, since I had bought The Foam Book. While I've made a puppet like this (see http://www.thepromptcopy.com/sal ) based on the Dolmio ads being shown here in Australia, I haven't actually made one in the same way. I had no idea what kind of muppet I was going to make when I started out, but decided that the book was the best way to learn how to do it.

Going to my local Spotlight, I found some very thin (say, 5mm deep) sheets of foam, some hot glue, and some glue guns. Plus, I bought a planetary mobile, which contained a bunch of different sized styrofoam balls. I had some spare thick cardboard from uni leftover, and some bits of cut up black t-shirt.

The first thing I did was to make a mouth: following the steps in the book, I cut out a piece of butcher's paper to the right shape. I cut a rectangular oval - knowing this was the kind of mouth I wanted, and planned to create the muppet around this idea - and traced this onto the cardboard. I then cut out the cardboard oval, and scored a line down the middle to make the piece fold in two.

Using the t-shirt bits, I hot-glued them over the cardboard, first one side, then the other - being sure to allow some give for the fold. Next, I cut out some thin strips of the foam, and rolled and hot-glued them into tubes. This made up my finger tubes, and I hot-glued these on the top and bottom of the cardboard 'mouth' (see picture below), and hot-glued the ends down at the front of the mouth.

Here you can see the mouth from the back of the head: the top finger tubes and the bottom finger tube are the three centre white bits. The black is the actual mouth.

Once this was done, I hot-glued some more of the t-shirt scraps over the tops of the tubes. The book suggests that you use a glue spray to do all this, but I didn't have any and didn't know where to get it. Anyway the hot-glue worked fine. Then the book suggests that you should spray the outside of the mouth with glue, to make the whole thing tough - but I simply coated it with some PVA. Combined with the hot-glue, the PVA made the outer mouth quite tough.

With the mouth done, I now had to attach a chin. The Foam Book offers two ways of creating the head; a three-piece method, and a nip-and-tuck method. I opted for nip-and-tuck which is more free-form, and creates a character based on improvisation (three-piece is much more pre-designed).

The book suggests taking a piece of foam and attaching it at the edge of the 'lip' of the bottom jaw, leaving an inch of extra foam at the sides. I hot-glued the edge of a piece of foam on as instructed, giving the jaw a bit of a an actual lip by gluing the foam edge higher than the jaw edge.

I was aiming to make the character have a 'bum chin', by folding over the foam into layers. I was going to do the same with the sides, but quite liked the 'fins' created by the back edges of the foam, and left it like that. Hot-gluing the folds down, I tidied it up a little, and the bottom jaw was done!

Now for the top of the head... Much more difficult to create than the bottom. I started by hot-gluing the edge of the foam sheet to the lip, as I had done for the bottom jaw. I tried folding the foam, tucking it into a tall, thin head, but it didn't look right.

I finally decided just to fold the edges of the foam down, and join them to the sides of the jaw, creating a very fish-like character. Later, showing it to my mum, she said it was very like Pilot from Farscape - which she knew I watched addictively - and she could have been right, considering I was watching it before starting on this puppet. Perhaps it was subconscious.

Hot-gluing the edges down, and to the bottom piece of foam, and tidying everything up, the top of the head was done. How easy was that!

Then, I decided the character needed eyes. I cut one of the foam balls in half, and hot-glued it onto the right places on the top foam piece.

How good does that look!

Below is a side-on view, plus a little bit of The Foam Book in the frame. You can see the folds of the foam at the back of the head.

Next, I painted the eyes, giving each a small white dot for the pupil. I also added some clear nail polish to the pupil, to give it a bit of shine. Not realising that it would also melt the foam ball a little, it actually was a nice little fluke - making the pupil concave.

Finally, I decided that the character needed a bit of material. Planning on making a neck from the material as well, I found some lovely material from a previous show to use as a 'fishy' flowing look.

Not quite sure how to attach it, I began by attaching the material to the edges of the bottom lip with some pins. Then, I pinned the bottom sides of the material to the bottom jaw - where the two foam pieces meet up. The bottom jaw was now covered with the material - but how to cover the top?

I scratched my head for a while, and then decided to fold the rest of the material up and over the top of the face. Now what to do with these dangly bits of material at the sides? Should I cut them off? No! I would fold these bits down over the face and across the cheek, lining up with where the joins in the foam.

Note that I don't leave any space for the eyes. That comes later.

Next, I carefully unpinned and glued each section of the material to the head. Note that I don't glue the whole of the material down, just at appropriate places: in the folds, to the lips, at the tops of each corner of the head (right and left), and at the back. (Side view below)

But now I needed to make the eyes a little easier to see. So I cut holes in the material near the eyes, and hot-glued the edges to the foam balls. A touch-up here and there of the paint, and the eyes looked great!

But I still had this whole mess of material hanging down from the bottom of the head. So I decided to fold the material under the chin, to make the material also do the 'bum chin' thing.

Here's a bottom view of the puppet, with the material:

Which brings me to the final step - once all this material was tidied up, I was left with nice dangly edges. So I decided to sew some purple-clothed wire to the outer edges of the material (in truth, I stitched it in some strategic places, and hot-glued the edges of the material over and on top of the wire).

This way you get a much more defined flow, and you can mould the shape of the material as you like it.

Now you see what I mean by Pilot from Farscape. 

I quite like this puppet - I opted out of making a body and neck for it. It looks quite good as just a head. And what I wanted to add was some feathers for eyebrows or eyelashes, but after having a look at some feathers on the eyes, I decided not to. I still feel that this is somewhat unfinished, but at the same time, I can leave it alone and it doesn't bug me...

I think this is a pretty good muppet-style head, considering it's my first go at one, and I didn't have a design in mind.

Now onto the next project...

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