Plasticine puppets: Rumplestiltskin

To save time and money, and because I am making the puppets out of different materials, I have decided that instead of making a whole plasticine maquette to make a mould from, I would only make the elements of the characters that were exposed and not covered by clothes. 

Rumplestiltskin's character has a fair amount of skin showing. He has his feet and ankles, his hands and arms, his head and his neck and a patch of his chest showing. This means that I have to make a lot of body parts for the moulds. For the feet, arms and neck, I will need to make resin moulds as these parts will all be in silicon so that they can move. I have sculpted as much detail into the feet and hands as I can as silicon has the ability to pick up small details. This means that I can make the puppet more detailed, hopefully adding to the visual quality of the puppet. I made the feet and ankles come up a little bit higher than necessary so that the trousers can hang over them without the danger of riding up to far and exposing the armature. This should make animating more manageable. 

Rumplestiltskin's shirt is short sleeved and torn which means that I had to make his arms reach all the way to his shoulders to avoid the possibility of exposing the armature on his shoulders. 

For Rumplestiltskin's head, I will need a silicon mould as I intend to make the heads out of resin. This will allow me to use stick on mouths and eyebrows to create expressions. It is for this reason that I have not sculpted the mouth or the eyebrows, as I hope to be able to create multiple expressions. I will not, however, be lipsyncing the characters so they don't need to have too many expressions. The eyes will be added later so that I have the ability to move them around, so I have sculpted deep holes that I will cut out of the resin. 

The neck is an issue on this character, and will also be an issue for the girl character as they both wear either low cut tops or ripped tops that expose some skin. This means that the chest needs to be partially made in silicon to prevent the armature peeping through. I have sculpted a simple neck with a portion of chest to solve this problem. I have made the neck longer than it needs to be so that it can go up into the head to make sure there won't be a gap between the head and the neck when the puppet moves around.