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Skip straight to the muppet building - read on for background info on the show.

Recently I commissioned a friend to write a one-woman puppetry show for me - unfortunately our puppeteer pulled out. Fortunately, my friend had another script which is delightfully apt for puppetry.

So my puppetry company, Sticky Apple Legs, is producing City Head.

You’re getting headaches.

It turns out you have a fairly advanced society living in, and off of, your brain.

You suffer from City Head... now what?

CITY HEAD

Presented by an emerging theatre company, Sticky Apple Legs, this world premiere is the first show ever to deal with the extremely rare condition of City Head, through comedy, musical theatre and puppets... and lego... lots of lego.

A combination of puppetry, comedy and theatre, this show is written by Tom Taylor – winner of Short & Sweet Melbourne.

Anyway, we're producing the play with some muppets, and this is the first one I've made so far. You may remember I made a muppet-style head using The Foam Book as my reference. This time I'm using their three-piece head method, instead of nip-and-tuck, to get that really 'muppet-y' feel.

Luckily I started making a mouth for one a while ago, so I just continued from there. For more info on how I made the mouth, see the previous post (linked above), as it is fairly detailed.

Here you can see inside the beginnings of the head, and the back of the mouth. The black half-circle is the bottom jaw, and those weird tubes on top and below the mouth piece are where you stick your fingers to control the jaws.

As you can see, I've made quite a mess on the dining room table. Something I get into trouble for a lot... You can also see The Foam Book to the right.

Would you believe that the three-piece method is actually quite easy? First you decide on the shape of the head. I wanted a quite oblong/oval shape for this muppet. I measured the height that I wanted. Then I measured the radius of the top jaw (around the lip), and cut a piece of paper to size. This was to make a basic pattern for the head, as well as to check the measurements were what I wanted. To curve it at the top, you 'dart' the pattern; cutting a triangular piece from the middle of the shape, and gluing the two triangular sides together, makes a nice little curve in the head.

To make the top of the head, you cut two of these patterns out of foam, glue the darts together, then glue the two halves together. The first photo shows the back of the head, or 'piece two' of the three-piece method. The photo above shows 'piece one'. As you can see, there is no jaw yet!

Using the same technique, you create a pattern and foam shape for the bottom of the jaw. This is 'piece three'. As you can see on the left, the jaw is somewhat cleft (and squashed, due to sitting on the ever messy table).

To the right of the head, you can actually see a circle of paper - that is my 'pattern' for the shoulder of the muppet.

Which as you can see, has been successfully used to the right. This is the body of the muppet; normally you add the neck, then the body, but I didn't have the material for the neck yet. So I just moved on to the next bit of the muppet.

First you measure the height of the body - slipping your hand into the mouth of the muppet head, you measure the length of your arm to your elbow beneath the jaw, then minus the length of the neck. I just estimated.

Once you have that, you need to work out the 'girth' or the width of the body. Here, I just picked a size that I liked. In fact, the size was a bit small, and I added a strip of foam to make it wider - hence the slight yellowish lines in the back of the foam in the pic above. That's the hot glue joining the pieces. So, now you have a tube of foam. The next step was to 'dart' the tops of the sides, so that the body curves in at the top. Two darts at either side of the body, under the shoulders, and one dart at the back of the neck. This is why the yellow lines converge; that's where the dart is for the back of the neck. Finally, you cut out a small 'scooped' neck line at the front of the body, to create easier movement of the head/jaw.

The shoulder was pretty easy. Using that circular pattern that I mentioned above, I cut out a circle of foam. Then I cut the circle in half. Gluing each half to the shoulder (straight side of the circle onto the 'shoulder' area of the body), and you have a jutting out shoulder. Somewhat like the American footballers' shoulders.

The next step was to reinforce the shoulders, since they get a lot of wear and tear. I just used some stretchy cream material to glue to the top and underneath of the shoulder and inside the top of the body; then coated it with a layer of PVA and let the material harden. Easy-peasy so easy!

In the pic above, you can also see some doll joints, which I'll use later to add rods to the hands.

In this very fuzzy and crooked shot, you can see the inside of the shoulder (where the pink blob is). More on that to come.

So now the shoulders are done! We need some arms! Gluing a tube of foam together, I made lengths of arms. I decided I wanted to use The Foam Book's suggestion of using nylon rope to attach the arms to the body, so I just made two lengths of foam for the arms.

Here you can see the arms finished - minus the hands.

Threading through one tube of the arm is some nylon rope (the pink thread). A made a small incision in the body, underneath the shoulder. Inside the shoulder (the fuzzy pic above), I added a washer from the doll joint kit, and knotted the rope on the inside of the body. I glued the knot for safety, and also glued the washer to the wall of the body. The arms of a muppet get a lot of pulling and tugging, so it was important to reinforce the shoulder joint. Nice! Now the arm's attached. To get an elbow from the tube, I tied some upholstery-strength cotton around a point in the tube where I wanted it to bend. Some glue on the knot, and ther you have it - an arm! Do the same for the other side and you have two arms! The leftover nylon rope will be attached to the hands.

The back of the body, with the arms attached. At the right, you can see some of the washers of the doll joints.

Using the same technique as the arms, I added two legs to the front of the body. I also covered the areas where the legs attach with some of the cream materal/PVA, to ensure the foam is reinforced. Inside the body, where the material is, I added a washer against the knot, for further reinforcement.

So now the body, arms and legs are done!

No, there is nothing wrong with this pic. Holding the head up with one hand, and taking the photo with the other, has provided an oddly-angled image.

You can *just* make out the eyes I drew on the face in order to make me envision the muppet easier.

.... On to the next bit! Read the next part of the build - making the hands - here. Do check out the Learn page for more info about making muppet-types. This was my first attempt at making one, and as such represents techniques or materials that I've since stopped using.

Did you know? You can now buy moppet eyes from my online store! Click here to check it out!

Want more? Help build a puppet!