Up In Arms

It was challenging to cast Kyra's arms and blend them into the build-up torso. I thought it was important to use the original sculpt's molds for the arms to be faithful to the original sculpture rather than just build them fresh. After doing it, though, build-up would have been much easier. But here we are.

I backfilled the mold with paper mache, fabric, and sponge material, adding a crude wire armature good enough for posing. No real stop-motion would be needed for this puppet, and I was trying to sprint. HA.

I used surgical fabric tape wrap layer when joining. It's highly adhesive and moldable; I love it. Covered that layer with glue-soaked fabric then another layer of paper mache to match her finished face texture.

It was another back-and-forth struggle to resize, cut open, excise, re-join, and unify her body. It looked clunky for so long that I considered quitting the whole project. I was doing my absolute best, but it wasn't looking good enough to use. I recalled this happening repeatedly, though, so I knew enough to keep grinding. Letting my hands work without my head knowing what they were doing. It remained a flop until I got the clothes to work, then all the finishing details came on board, and it suddenly looked right. Suddenly, I saw her sitting on the table, and there was nothing more to change. She worked.

I set about mixing the colors (bottom right) into a warm blood flesh clay pink for the insides of the arms and hands while the backs were made of an ochre base color, then dark blue-black brown washed all over. The highlights were scrubbed back to the ochre and pink (below left).

Despite the top coats, the paper skin kept ripping when the figure was shifted into new poses. I kept filling the tears with glue and repainting. And because I hadn't made an articulate armature, the pose changes wouldn't hold. I installed metal plates in the backs of her arms and squeezed them in place at her sides by hooking them together with a small bungee across the back (below right).

She matches the other Halfland puppets in crude paper mache style. And she won't need to do too much. I might like the way superimposing her positions looks out of doors, as a slow-motion video montage.