A Historic Homecoming 20 Years in the Making.

Even though the Rana puppet, the Halfland film series' main character, is still in progress above, this marks the first moment in history anywhere that Rana appears in her own cottage. Even though she's elevated on a base, I can tell her scale will work perfectly (whew).  Her hand-made-ness, the paper texture, her demeanor, everything is so exciting for me to actually get to finally see!

Always grabbing 1/2L reference material, years ago I made a screen grab on a YouTube video of a village animal in China that was wearing some sort of sandal(!) These are being reproduced on the hooves sculpted from rigid air dray clay that cover the puppet's armature tiedowns. I've made tracings around each one and cut two each out of chip board that will sandwich hand-painted cording seen raw, lower right.

Lower left shows how I taped down the strands of goat hair flatly in order to paint on a line of Fray Check elastic glue to hold them together before cutting off the lash lines to glue onto her eyelids. Upper right, previews how her fetlock will look once the legs get covered in the skins.

Here she is, folks! all ready for her final flexible skin layers to be added onto her. Plus a preview of how her hocks might look in the goat skin piece I bought 20 years ago in New York for this exact moment.