SCULPTURE: "Grandma Puppet"

I'm so happy to have creative friends to collaborate with! I spent the month of December 2018 working on a large puppet for actor/dancer Karen Lisondra and her husband, multi-instrumentalist Amado Espinoza. This puppet is a bit of a caricature of Amado's 102 year old Grandmother in Bolivia!! We all were inspired by the works of master puppet maker, Amelia Madeline. I studied a lot of videos on YouTube online about the process of making a puppet out of soft polyfoam, fabric, and latex rubber. It was a blast to work on...my first ever using these materials. Karen is working on a story to perform with Amado in the future using "Grandma". Stay tuned!!

SCULPTURE: Pirate Puppet

Ahoy, Maties!  Once again I return to my love of pirates to create my most recent project...a puppet! I have always loved marionettes. And while this puppet is more like The Muppets in format, I was definitely thinking of old-school paper mache construction.

Below is a series of photos showing the various stages that the head went through. I made several changes along the way, figuring it out as I went. I found the beard and hair at some hobby shops and a costume shop. I also found the soft-foam pirate's hat at a hobby shop. No need to create from scratch, if the props work.

After I got some comments that the pirate looked scary, I decided to soften edges a bit by adding more "skin" around the mouth to cover up the teeth a bit more. I think it helped some.

 

A couple of weeks after I had completed the puppet head, I was able to focus on building the pirate's body. It had been decades since I had used a sewing machine, so my skills were virtually non-existent for this project. I also had a lot of hand stitching to pull this thing together. I thought that using used children's clothing that I got at a thrift store would make things easier. Wrong. At least I had fun making the tiny little pirate shoes out of cardboard and paper mache! The hand was created with epoxy "Magic Clay".

 

Here's a view of the stand I made to hang the pirate on. The head of the puppet is VERY heavy, so I added a little "hook" to hold the weight of the body. You can also see the rod that connects to the "hook hand"...it nicely holds the arm forward a bit when on the stand.

Aaaarrrgh...that be the end of the tale of the Puppet Pirate! (Or is it just the beginning?!!!)

CHALK ART: "Under The Sea"

Last Friday, I worked up another driveway chalk mural for the kids in the neighborhood to draw on. You can see the "before" and "after" version, once the young artists (and some parents) added their own sea creatures. Apparently, this is "Shark Week" on the Discovery Channel, as I write this. Great timing!