My first completed puppet

[RottenPuppets]

great looking first puppet!!!!

when i build mine i generally do them on the fly with ideas from inside the 'ole noggin. i'm not good @ drawing so i end up just translating whats up in there as i go and hope everything works out ok....

 

[Ventrilotwist]

I'm the same way as RottenPuppets. For my last puppet i used a pattern as the base, but didn't figure out exactly what I was doing after the base pattern until I was doing it. I have yet to draw a design that I've actually built. I drew one out of boredom but I couldn't get what was in my head on paper so if I do use the puppet I won't be using that drawing lol.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

That looks great! Why did you come down so hard on yourself about it? Keep up the great work!

 

[aaronmojo]

Thanks again for the kind words. I am going to try to post my concept sketches for this guy later tonight, if anybody's interested...
Ventrilotwist -- the pre-made Teddy Bear shirts that I found were pretty small for this guy. I created him with the intention of being able to change outfits but I don't know how feasible that is, since he's wider at the bottom than at the top.
He's falling apart at the seams inside where the foam is glued together, with that Dap Contact Cement (which an old thread now has me terrified of using in my apartment). I wish I could find something a little stronger...

 

[itchekadoozy]

When i first started building puppets 2 years ago, i learned from the foam book. So i wasn't aware of any other glueing method than the glue gun. By the time I even heard about contact cement I had already gotten hooked on the glue gun. It may seem like a newbie thing to some, but for me it does what i need.

As for sketches....Up until 2 years ago, cartooning and animation were my only real forms of character design. When I started building puppets, it was a lot of fun getting to create a character in a completely different way. You can't just draw it and see it come to life, you've got to cut those pieces out and glue 'em all together before you even begin to see anything even resembling a character. The transition was really exciting, but i've found that i'm totally unable to draw a design for a three-dimensional character. It just doesn't work for me. So i just use the building process as the sketching- in other words, I don't have a definate idea of what the character looks like before i start building, i just know who the character is. Only a few times has it come out completely terrible, but i think those times were when I had no clear character in mind when i started.

As for the mouth, how exactly did it get like that?

If you sewed the mouth inside directly to the head covering, you may need to make sure that the mouthplate sxtend a bit past the mouth coloring, to avoid the inside curling up like that, and to maintain a straight curve in front. Or you may want to consider gluing the head covering to the mouth so that you have direct control over the overlap there.

Hope that wasn't too lmuch.

Great puppet for a first try. My first looked like a rotting puppet corpse. It had flat felt eyes, creepy yarn hair, and hand sewn stitches that were like a cm apart in some places. And it was 5 feet tall.

 

[biblebetty]

Hey, for your first time this puppet is really cute. is he or she a dragon or a fish. you did a good job .

 

[aaronmojo]

Itchekadoozy, with the one line "If you sewed the mouth inside directly to the head covering, you may need to make sure that the mouthplate sxtend a bit past the mouth coloring, to avoid the inside curling up like that, and to maintain a straight curve in front" you solved the single biggest problem I've been having. I knew nothing of "mouth plates" before building this puppet, and it never occurred to me to try what you suggested!

Bible Betty, Muppet Pro, thanks -- the sewing is all hand-done. The eyes are the extremely low-tech method of ping pong balls half-covered in fleece, with a strip of "Sticky Fun Foam" along the edge to create the eyelid.

My scanner cable is missing so I haven't had a chance to show off my concept sketches (I am coming from an illustration / animation background as well, Itche). 3-D stuff doesn't come easy to me, and I'm colorblind to boot, so I like to have everything worked out in drawing form before I start anything.

I think my next pass with Skip the Dinosaur is going to have him lavendar rather than green, to avoid the constant "Kermit the Frog" wisecracks I keep getting... Thanks again!