Making the Prime Minister

This puppet is the first of the in profile “hero face” puppets that I designed. I decided to give the in profile puppets a nodding head and articulated mouth but not moving eyes like the face-on “hero face” puppets. At this stage I was using cereal packet cardboard (both for environmental and financial reasons) but it was quite hard to do the detailed cutting out required for this character and style of puppet.

I discovered that I didn’t need to re-draw the figure but that a scaled up photocopy gave me the exact size I wanted and I was very happy with the image as it stood
Chopping out pin-stripes by hand with a scalpel blade
I made 3 photocopies, 1 for the body, 1 for the head and 1 for the lower jaw. These were then glued with a dry glue stick to cereal packet cardboard and I cut straight through both layers
Having used cereal packet card I painted this black on both sides which strengthens the card and stops the cereal packet picture showing through on the screen.
The pieces are laminated and roughly cut out
I initially made the overlap section for the neck with 4 cut away sections with a rim around the outside (looking like a wheel). The cut away sections are to show off the cut outs on the section of the body which it overlaps. I decided that it would be okay to cut away even more of the “wheel” so that the maximum amount of cut out on the body would be exposed.
The lamination plastic on the edges is trimmed off as it shows up too much when used on the OHP flatbed. I attached the neck joint using string
I attach the lower jaw using thick thread so that the fastening doesn’t mask any of the cut out work.
I braided three strands of bead elastic together for extra strength. This is used to secure the jaw in a closed position so it doesn’t waggle or flap about and stretches to allow mouth movements when they are required. It may also allow for a thread control mechanism to control the mouth movement rather than a control rod.
The puppet is complete (apart from controls)