2 Nov 04
Beer-drinking Halloween puppet.
An update! I just got a digital camera, so I've retaken the pictures. Instead of horrible scans, I've now got reasonably good digital shots.
Here is my 2004 Halloween costume. I had a simple dream: to build a puppet that would ride on my shoulder, move its mouth, and drink beer. . . .
I started out with a sketch so that I could get a rough idea of what I wanted to do.
Horrible blunt teeth were necessary, as were large horns. I started out with a plastic spool from a printer ribbon as a basic shape. To this, I added some wire to form armatures for the horns, as well as an attachment for the string that would make his head move. I sculpted the main features of the head, including the eye sockets, upper lips, and upper teeth, all in one go, then realized that the head needed more leverage to move than a short piece of wire would provide. To take care of that problem, I sunk a nail head-first into the back of the puppet's neck, then baked the upper half of the head. (As I sculpted, I watched The Screaming Skull, a terribly cheesy 50s horror movie.)
The lower half was more of a challenge. I wanted the puppet to be able to drink beer, so I needed some sort of funnel and draining system. I also wanted him to have arms, probably wooden so that I could easily hinge the forearms by adding a pin. I finally settled on a film canister (the little black plastic kind) for a basic shape. I drilled three holes -- two for the arms (a wooden dowel) and one for the drainage (three feet of vinyl tubing). I packed the inside of the canister with Sculpey, then attached the top of the tube to a largish icing tip to form a funnel of sorts. The hole was a little small, but a quick test showed that it drained quickly. Again, I sculpted the main features all in one sitting. At the last minute, I remembered that I needed to add a hinge, so I sunk the long half of a small decorative door hinge into the Sculpet. I wrapped the tubing in aluminum foil to help keep it from melting, then put the whole thing into the oven to cure. (Silver Bullet was on as I sculpted the lower half of the head.)
The teeth and lips were sculpted out of Sculpey (as I mentioned above), so there was no problem there (except that one of the teeth came out during a drinking demonstration -- an easy fix). The other features would be pretty fragile if they'd been sculpted from polymer clay, so I used Kneadatite (or green stuff) instead. I added asymmetrical horns (including one over the nail at the back of the head), a long nose, and horrible small nipples (since I knew I'd be posting this to mini-painter).
When everything had cured, I was left with the problem of affixing the top half to the hinge on the bottom half. Liquid epoxy wouldn't work, since I'd left plastic exposed on the roof of the puppet's mouth. Cyanoacrylate glue would never hold up by itself, either. And an engineering error had left me with a mouth that didn't open nearly as wide as I'd hoped. I marked the spots where the nails would go, then drilled pilot holes as near as I could manage to the nails' exact size. After that, I glued everything into place with CA glue. It seems to have held really well -- the stress is pretty light, since there's a long lever at the back, and the small room to open means that the mouth is less likely to bang shut.
I painted him up really quickly with Apple Barrel paints, chosen for their cheapness (for projects like this) as well as their long shelf life, then had to figure out a rig to attach him to my shoulder. It turns out that a belt looped around itself once was ideal -- it fit comfortably around my shoulder without sliding or cutting off my circulation. I attached some dental floss to the back of the head, and I was able to work it with my left hand, so that people "talking" to it couldn't see. (Austin Powers was on during this portion of building the puppet.)
He's around 5 inches tall, or about 13 cm. The floss and tubing are visible in this shot. . . his mouth moves up and down when the floss is pulled, and the tube eventually connects to the frosting tip. I need to shave the back of the neck down a bit so that his mouth opens wider. . . .
Here's a quick soundless .wmv movie of the puppet moving his mouth. It helps to imagine him singing "Figaro" from The Barber of Seville. . . you know the one.
I finished him up fairly late in the evening, but he was received reasonably well at the party. People were disturbed and intrigued, which is always what I'm shooting for, I suppose. Sadly, the small mouth meant that I got more beer on my shoulder than into the plastic bag I'd rigged up at the end of the tubing as his bladder, but he was still a hit among those partygoes with steady hands.
He was a heck of a lot of fun to make, and went over reasonably well at the Halloween parties I attended this weekend. Maybe most importantly, he's gotten me out of my creative slump, if only temporarily.