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Eyes are the life of a puppet - get it right, and the puppet will look wonderful on stage. Get it wrong, and the puppet will seem lifeless, limp, and will not be able to connect emotionally with the audience. On some occassions, you may want to have hollowed out eye sockets, for those particularly more creepy characters, like evil beings or skeletons. But when you want to have a puppet with proper eyes, you will want them to look spectacular. 

Eyes can be made out of a range of materials: beads, polystyrene balls, clay, the tops of spoons, marbles... or you may just want to carve them into, or out of, whatever material you used for the puppet's head. Whatever material you use, you should keep the following in mind: 

1. Because the eyes of a puppet are so important, you must make sure that they are positioned correctly on the face of the puppet. The eyeline of the puppet tells the audience where it is looking, and what it is looking at. Get it wrong, and the puppet may stare incomprehensibly at the audience - even though it's talking to a fellow puppet on stage - and even the smallest change in angle can greatly affect the direction of the eyeline and even the emotion of the puppet!
2. The eyes should be easy to see from a great distance, and from a range of angles. The audience will need to see the eyes from different sightlines, and unless there is a reason in the script for it, you should avoid having facial features (ie. long hair, huge eyebrows, etc.) that cover the eyes.
3. Experiment with colours, shapes, materials, and other techniques - you can easily change the character of a puppet, just by changing the eyes!
4. You may want to consider whether you want the eyes to stick out from the head of the puppet, come out through the puppet's head (ie. be installed inside the head, with some of the face of the head cut out to reveal the eyes), or whether you want the eyes to move side-to-side or up and down, or indeed to blink or wink.
5. You will need some way of attaching the eyes to the head of the puppet. You will probably want to glue them on. You should also ensure that the materials used for the eyes are not too heavy - remember, you want the puppet to be as light as possible!
6. Keep in mind all the principles of puppet design.

Painting puppet eyes

Step One

Here's a great trick for creating great looking eyes. You can use any material as the basis, but I'm going to show you the technique with half of a polystyrene ball. My friend Jeany taught me this neat little trick, and I use it every time I create a puppet eye. You probably won't want to attach the eyes to the puppet just yet, but you will need some way of temporarily attaching them to test whether or not they are placed correctly before finalising them. 

Get your material for the eye - in my case, the ball - and with a pencil, lightly draw a large circle onto the top of the ball. It should be equidistant from the edges of the ball; you can make it as large or as small as you like, according to the size of your eyeball material. This will make up the iris, or coloured part, of the eye. If the material isn't white already, you may want to paint it white before following any of these steps. 

Now grab a very thin paintbrush and some acrylic paint. Choose whatever colour paint you want the iris to be; mix some paints up if you like. I prefer to use rich colours, not too dark, but not too light either. With the paintbrush, paint inside the pencilled outline; I find that painting in small arc-like motions from the inside of the outline to the edge of the outline, means I make less mistakes and can make a very neat painted iris (in other words, I don't go outside the lines). Take your time, and if you need to, swap to a smaller brush size. 

Wait until the paint dries, and if you need to do another coat, do so. It's good to do it anyway, but you do need to make sure that the paint is smooth and without gaps. If you mixed up a particular colour, don't wash away the excess from your palette. You may need it later for touch ups. 

Step Two

Take a clean brush - the smallest one you can find - and some black paint. This paint will serve as the pupil of the eye. Now paint a small black circle over part of the iris. I find that it's best to paint the circle as such: on the left eye for the puppet, paint the circle towards the bottom right corner of the iris. For the right eye of the puppet, paint the circle towards the bottom left corner of the iris. (If that's too confusing, paint both eyes in the same corner of the iris, then flip one of the eyeballs around 180 degrees when you're done) 

The reason why you paint it in these corners is that when you place the eyes on the puppet, the puppet should look directly out - stand the puppet in front of a mirror. If it looks at itself, you've got it right. If it looks cross-eyed or somewhere else, you'll need to rearrange or re-angle the eyes. 

Again, paint from the centre of where you want the pupil to go, and make small arcing brushes around that point, until the pupil is as large as you want it. If you make mistakes, and the edge of the pupil is smudged with the iris, wait until the paint dries, make any touch ups, and continue on. You should have a good coat of the black paint; if not, do another coat. I generally find that the first coat is enough, and I don't do a second in case I ruin the good paint job I've already done. 

Step Three

Once the paint is dry, take a dressmaker's pin - one with a head on it - and lightly dip the head in some white paint. This white paint will become 'reflections' in the eye. I take one of the eyes, and place a small dot of white just at the top edge of the pupil; I make another white dot diagonally up from the first one, at the top of the iris; and a third, smaller dot at the side of the pupil. This is where it's important to have the eyes facing the correct way, as these 'reflective' dots affect the eyeline direction of the puppet. (See picture below of the actual puppet to see the angle of the eyes and for more clarity) 

Be absolutely sure of the placement of the dots before painting them, because making touch ups at this point can be frustrating and tricky. 

Step Four

Wait until the paint is dry. Now, we give the eye a little bit of a shine. Because I used polystyrene, I'm going to give only the iris and the pupil a coat of PVA glue. (The polystyrene melts when giving it the shine; the coat of PVA prevents that from happening) If you're not using a foam for the eye, ignore the coat of PVA. 

Now get out some varnish - I find that clear nail polish will do. Be sure to use it in a well-ventilated area. Brush on the nail polish only over the iris and pupil, leaving the white of the eye unvarnished. You will see already that the paint colours will seem brighter, stronger and deeper, and the eye suddenly seems so much more lifelike. This shine also means that the eye has a greater chance of catching the light in a theatre or outside, and assists in making the eyes more noticeable to the audience member. 

Leave the eyes to dry. Once they are, you're all set to attach the eyes to the puppet's head! (Click on the picture at right for larger view of the eyes) 

This little trick works well with any eye material, and once you get the hang of it, you can make fabulous eyes over and over again with minimum fuss. Plus, you can make these easily while working on another part of the puppet, since much of the work is waiting for the paint to dry! But hey, if you want to try some other techniques, I suggest heading over to Puppet Building.com and Puppets and Stuff, where there some great tutorials on making eyes - including using thread to create bloodshot eyes!

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