BattleDuck

Next weekend,  I am will be debuting a new poem called Ten Pound Lafiitte, to the world!  Actually and hopefully, it will be to a full house at The YMCA Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  We are listed as one of the vaudeville acts in the a show called Kalliope’s Karavan. More info regarding that show can be found here.  Our listing is called Professor Terrance Redbone.

The main props that I had to make, of worthy note, are the Ten Pound Lafitte hat and the mechanical troll witch teeth stick. Terrance will recite the poem while, the beautiful Trixie wear’s the frog hat and utilizes the troll teeth to good effect. Perhaps, we shall see you there : )

Grimpen is a relatively large puppet with a reasonable amount of weight.  I decided to put a removable rod into him. This will help with holding the arm up and provide more precise mouth movement.  The trade off  is that some of the frenetic things you can do with a hand puppet are lost to the stiffness of the rod. Making the rod removable gives me the best of both worlds.

Some general notations:

The rod had to be customized to Grimpen’s anatomy.

The hinge for the bottom jaw was way too small so I enlarged it with a piece of aluminum from my scrap box. The aluminum piece was originally one of those struts that snaps onto a rail and a bunch of them in a row gives you a place to put a shelf. Application of a hacksaw and files turned the strut into a longer, wider, lightweight jaw which was bolted to the hinge itself.

The springs are from those cheapo desks  lamps. You know , the ones that extend and can be tightened so the lamp can be placed anywhere. Horse hockey!! They don’t work worth a damn but there are 6-8 springs on some of them!

After having  seen a few variations of mouth works,  I decided on my own version after a bit of  experimentation. My first forays were with dowel rods which I found were not the way to go for me.  The wood was too soft, split easily and did not stand up to experimentation whatsoever. I also learned that attaching flat surfaces to rounded forms is simply making things harder than they need to be. Note in the pictures the beat up hinge that is attached to the rod.  This is the effect of trying to put a flat surface on a round one.

The wood is a left over scrap from a threshold project I did on the house.   It is a piece of red oak, measuring roughly 3/4 of an inch on each side and cut to 18 inches long. The piece I cut off was again cut to a length of about 6  inches and placed in a vice.  I rounded the top with a  chisel and judicial hand pressure. I want it round and smooth here so the spring can ride smoothly over this area.

Working with red oak is really nice. You can drill it repetitively and not worry about splitting. It responds to metal working tools like rasps and files admirably and generally does not cost all that much more than much less desirable woods.

Through the pictures you will note small holes drilled all over. These were holes for the eye screws for the spring as I tested various placements for optimum tension of the spring and still fit within the puppet. Do this with a softer wood and soon you will have nothing but splinters.

In the end, I found that the optimum spring location for this particular puppet had the spring starting at the bottom jaw hinge, traveling up and over the top mouth support and then back down to the hinge itself.  There is no right or wrong way. Just ways that work better than others.

The rod was secured, internally, with a rope that passes through Grimpen’s lower jaw. This keeps the rod where it needs to be to work best and makes it removable within a few knots.

Onward with the pictures!

The folks at TempleCon needed a cover so I did them one up for their program. The convention is February 5-7, 2010.  It is a gaming convention with heavy overtones of steampunk activity. There is also an art show and guest writers. Performing there with a rendition of The Dorset Duckling, will be those famous puppet personalities, Professor Terrance Redbone and The Great Grimpen Mire. If you are in the area, come on down for a different fun event that you will remember for some time to come. For more information regarding TempleCon, click here.

HAPPY NEW YEAR and the best of whatever it is that you seek for yourself in 2010! Yep, I know it is a bit past the new year but Life has a way of sticking her fingers in my pudding and messing things up. The least of  Her meddling lately is a broken rib incurred from sword fighting. I am just going to have to learn to protect myself better! Anyway, the following is a list of the events that I am going to be involved with in the next couple of months. If you are attending, please come on by and say hello!

January 15-17 Arisia 2010 Cambridge, Ma……art show

January 29-30 Birka Market, SCA, Manchester NH……fencing

February 5-7 Templecon, Warwick, RI………..art show, puppet performance, CoC game

February 12-14 Boskone 47, Boston, MA………art show

February 26, Odditoruium, Canbridge, MA……..puppet performance.

The February 26th date at the Odditorium show will be the debut of my new poem called Ten Pound Lafitte.  It’s a rousing story about a chef and an unwilling frog. Terrance and Grimpen will be doing the performance.

Hope to see y’all about!

Manuela needed a costume for Raks Spooki, New England’s largest and longest running gothic belly dance festival, featuring dancers from the homelands of HP Lovecraft, Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe.

The costume is actually two piece and I used acrylics in three different painting sessions to get a modulated grayscale going so as to lend an extra dimensionality to the bones. In addition, every corpse needs some worms! In the pictures they are in her hands. They are 18″ dowel rods painted black, with two ping pong balls hot glued for the eyes. Some light flowing material cut into strips was fed through an eye hook in the top and then a brightly colored piece of a boa was hot glued in between the eyes for an upstanding and outstanding hairdo. Manuela will be doing  a routine where she will be using the worms to dance and fly through the air. I love puppets!

For those who are interested in attending some otherworld performances:

“Raks Spooki IV” A Gothic Belly Dance Event  Sun Nov. 15th, 7pm

The Regent Theatre, 7 Medford St. , Arlington , MA

Today is the last entry, hooray! So the lips first. After determining how long the lip line was, I cut some fleece into the shape of a flattened oval. It was then rolled up and a quick stitch applied to hold the general shape. The tapered shape helps the material from getting too bulky at the ends. These ends were tucked into wrinkles at the corners of the mouth and then I carefully hot glued the rest to the edge of the mouth.  It looked pretty good but  it was pulling away from the face more than I wanted  so I decided to stitch the lip to the skull.  A straight needle was not going to do for this area and curved upholstery needles were just way too large.  I took a few needles and heated them up with a torch and bent them around a piece of small  copper pipe.  I then sharpened them ends on a stone because the points were quite dull.  They worked fairly well and I managed to stitch both lips down.  Some research on the web showed that they do make small curved needles for quilting so I will have to look into those.

Arms were created by folding the material over on itself and sketching in a basic arm shape with a marker.  I then followed the lines on the sewing machine.  The arms were inverted with the help of some surgical snaps to pull through the fingers. I then made an extra hand with a lot of long fingers, inverted it and then cut the fingers off.  These are to be my thumbs and strange bits of bumps sticking out all over the place.  Small slices were placed in the palms, the fingers were pushed through so they stuck out of the slice and machine stitches were run across the palms to hold everything in place.  Some oval shapes were then cut from the fleece and cross shaped cuts were placed in the center of those.  The arms ends were inserted into those cross shaped cuts. The end flaps of the arms were sewn to the bottom face of the oval shapes.  Then these were hand-sewn to the body.

The eyes: one of them is a ballistic ball and the other is a ping-pong ball.  They were painted with acrylics to go along with the overall color scheme and texture.  When I had initially made the skull, I figured out where the eyes were going to rest.  I had removed foam from that area because I wanted the eyes to be sunken into the form and not just sit on top.  I cut out small circles of the fleece where these recesses where at and clipped the edges of the fleece to relieve tension.  I kept flipping back until the eye rested easily in the socket and then they were hot glued down. The eyes were hot glued down so that the pupils are slightly crossed thus giving the illusion that the puppet is actually looking at you.  If the eyes are  parallel then the effect is just the opposite.

So that is it. Fini. This series of entries is not intended as a tutorial but to demonstrate how one process was done.  A lot of what was in my notes and sketches was abandoned as chaff and dead ends of experimentation. Most of what I have wrote is the condensation of what was left. You should, of course, explore your own methods and if anything I’ve done here helps you in your efforts, then terrific!

So Terrance is done! Here are his pictures.  I am hoping to make a small one or two minute video of a quick skit so we can see how he moves.  Any comments or suggestions, please let me know: )

February 7, 2009, Providence, Rhode Island TempleCon, now having completed its fourth incarnation, is a gaming festival, a social celebration and basically a three-day party.  They got continuous gaming, live music, and this year some live performances…. cabaret style!!!  Ameena was one of several performers scheduled for the mid afternoon diversion special performance.

We arrived Saturday morning and were quickly greeted by the sight of crowds of people gaming literally everywhere from the second to fourth floors.  They were in the halls, on the stairs, in the ballrooms and in little out-of-the-way niches. I’m not sure but I thought I even heard some rustling of dice in the bathrooms. Gamers are a crazed lot.

The Biltmore Hotel (1922) is beautiful old building with much of its architecture and detailing still intact, a perfect atmosphere for the steampunk aesthetic. The live performances were excellent and went over quite well with the crowds. This convention is growing year by year and boasts some really great artwork, authors, vendors, and continuous gaming of almost any genre you could possibly think of.  I look forward to going again next year when I’m going to take a nap beforehand so I can get in on one of those two o’clock in the morning Cthulhu rampage games!