Bird Girls!

The first three puppets I decided to make were the bird girls who function sort of as chorus girls or backup singers in the story. I did this because they are relatively minor characters and I assumed there might be a learning curve to the whole puppet-making process. I was right. I wanted to keep these three bird girls pretty similar overall but with different colored feathers. A picture of my puppet-making station is below along with the yellow bird girl who was the first one I completed. Overall I thought that she was too thick around the middle and in her thighs, her feet were too big, and her armature too stiff.


The other two bird girls were made the same basic way as the first but with a few minor adjustments. The method I used was outlined in both Priebe's and Brierton's books and seemed by far to be the most economical. The armature was made of aluminum wire, sturdy yet flexible.


I used some five minute epoxy to secure the most fragile portions of the armature. On the first bird girl I used more epoxy than I did on these two and that's why she is so stiff! For these characters that much epoxy was not necessary.


The aluminum-epoxy bones were covered with lightweight foam secured with a thinner gauge copper jewelry wire and some hot glue when needed. This step was important in making the puppets as light as possible. The heads were made of styrofoam balls hotglued into place with indented eye sockets.

After that, each frame was covered with plasticine skin. Plasticine is the type of oily modeling clay that never dries out but is still quite stiff at room temperature. That's what's so heavy and so I used the least amount possible. Head and tail feathers were added in addition to plasticine eyes, seed bead pupils, and embroidery thread eyelashes.


Beaks of different expressions were made for each bird girl with Sculpey (polymer clay that gets hard when you bake it in your home oven). Plasticine accents were added to the baked beaks to enhance each expression.


The pink and green bird girls wearing their 'rest' beaks. Each Sculpey beak was poked with a toothpick before baking so that after baking they can be easily interchanged when a toothpick is attached to the bird girl's face. Below are the ranges of expression for each of the bird girls. Each girl has her own set of beaks but it is nearly identical to the other two sets.