What we say.

1. I think we’re going to have to rip their spines out.
2. Want to try on my beaver?
3. Man. That’s a seriously long rod
4. The chicken lady isn’t safe around other puppets
5. What am I supposed to do with this extra head?
6. The beaver was too tight for him
7. Look! Spanking the monkey works best.
8. I can’t find his other leg
9. I’ve done a lot of dogs.
10. I need a better vice

What it really means.

1. The monkeys for Serendib need to have the spring steel in their spines replaced.
2. I made a beaver costume and was selling it
3. A rod puppet with a six foot rod.
4. A marionette was infested by bugs
5. I was selling off stuff from my workshop and had a couple of plaster heads
6. Same beaver costume
7. We were trying to come up with the best movement for the Serendib monkey puppets and, indeed, spanking the monkey did it.
8. After we moved, one of the puppets I brought with me was missing a leg.
9. We were talking about roles, and I can generate almost a whole page of dog roles for my resume
10. While bending some wire, I was coveting a colleague’s very hefty desk vice, mine is a small pony vice which is just barely adequate for work.

Subterranean Press has asked me to create three dolls of the title character in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, using the art of Dave McKean as my reference point. Mr. Gaiman and Mr. McKean will each receive one of these, and the third goes to a lucky customer who preorders Coraline direct from SubPress.

To begin, I do a scale drawing of Coraline, extrapolating from Mr. McKean’s interior art for her body and the cover for her face. The first thing that struck me upon seeing it was how much his cover art resembled Albrecht Roser’s paper-folding technique. This is a style that I used extensively in our production of the Snow Queen. The idea of working in paper is very appealing for this project because I think it speaks to text. My plan now, is to work pieces of the text into the puppet as a textural element. More about that as we go along.

The first thing I did was to establish the size. Coraline will be 16″ tall. Looking at the drawing allows me to consider my material choices more thoroughly. To give you an understanding, her wrists will be about the thickness of a pencil. Now, in a puppet, I’d have to be worrying about durability in performance, which is thankfully not an issue here. At the moment, I’m considering paper or wood for her limbs. I may look at cloth as well, but I would still want an internal structure because I hate it when arms break at the wrong point. Wood will be the easiest, so I suspect that is what I will go with, though the purist in me wants to build the whole thing out of paper.

The next step though, will be to work on her face. That is going to be the hardest part of the process, so it’s the one I do first. The rest of it is sort of, you know, generic puppet building.