Sometimes when dealing with props I can’t find the real thing or even a replica of it, so I just have to make it. In this case, we needed a Pictish helmet as one of the apparitions in MacBeth. The halloween stores had loads of helmets, but were strangely lacking in anything Pictish. Spartan on the other hand… those were everywhere. So I picked up the helmet in the photo for $9.00. It’s cheap vacuformed plastic and only vaguely the right shape.

The nice thing about this type of material is that it cuts easily. I began be trimming it into the shape that I needed, which was pretty easy to do with a pair of scissors

Next up, I used basic braid to create the decorative flourishes from my reference photo. The spiral patterns I did with a judicious use of hot glue as a design element.

Meanwhile, inside the helmet, I ran a hoop of armature wire to stiffen it and get rid of the woogedy-woogedy movement. Seriously, if you’re a warrior, you don’t want your helmet quivering.

To finish it off, I spray painted the whole thing bronze and then spattered it with a little black to give it a patina of age. Ah… I love it when a plan comes together.

We went out for dinner afterwards and a much-deserved beer. I think both of us felt like we’d been leaning into a galeforce wind that got suddenly switched off. Sure, I have other things on my plate, but I’m actually not pressed against a deadline for the moment. It’s liberating but also disconcerting. I keep feeling like trying to correct for that wind and losing my balance, you know?

One of the interesting things, for me, about building or designing is that it uses the same part of my brain as writing does. It’s the part that solves problems and tries to come up with a coherent language for whatever story I’m trying to tell, whether it’s physical or a verbal. I’ve noticed before that my productivity in writing goes way down when I’m designing but not when I’m performing. It’s not that I can’t write, but the creative drive is being spent elsewhere. You know?

When I’m writing, I walk to the subway and I’m thinking, “How do I get him out of this…?” but when I’m designing, I’m thinking, “How can I make this stand up…?”

A director once said to me, “I want you to start with a blank stage and then create the universe.” That’s the creation process in both fields in a nutshell, isn’t it.

Materials

The first thing to do is make sure you’re working with that right stuff.

• Wheat-based wallpaper paste. Why wheat? It has glucose in it, which binds with the cellulose in paper making a much stiffer and stronger wall, so you need fewer layers.
• Brown paper bags & other paper. The important thing here is that you don’t use newspaper. The fibers are short and it has no structural integrity of its on. Mostly it’s used as a counting layer. You do need paper that’s two different colors so you can tell what areas you’ve papier-mache and what you haven’t. I use either leftover printer paper (recycling) or scrap pages out of my sketchpad. As long as it’s not the same color as the bags, a similar weight, and it is uncoated it will work.
• Tissue paper. Yes I do mean Kleenex or toilet paper. We will use this to separate the paper from the form. Regardless of whether you are doing direct papier-mache or working into a mold you don’t want it to stick when it’s dry.
• Plaster mold (optional) If you know how to make a plaster mold it is easier and faster to work into a negative than to papier-mache directly on the form.

Technique

1. Mix your wallpaper paste in a shallow container like a pie-plate (anything will work this is easiest). Make a small batch. (Trust me, you will appreciate having to stop and wash your hands to make more.) Cover the bottom of the pan with cool water. Shake a SMALL amount of the paste onto the water. Add more if you need to for the right consistency. I use the Zen method of mixing till it feels right, which for me is like cream of wheat or a melted milkshake.
2. Tear the paper into 6″ pieces (approximately). Don’t cut it. You want a soft edge on the paper so it will adhere better and more smoothly to the other pieces.  If you’re using heavy paper, like paper bags, put the pieces in a bucket of water to soak. (Printer paper with disintegrate if you do that, so, um, don’t.) This is much like the stage where you soak fabric before dying it. It helps the pores open up and absorb the paste better. It also makes the paper more pliable for going around corner. And finally, it makes the paper swell slightly. As it dries you get a tighter bond with fewer air bubbles.
3. Place the dry tissue paper in the mold (or on your form). After it is covered with a single layer, sprinkle it with water. I’ve splurged on art tissue before and it doesn’t work as well as facial tissue because, well, facial tissue is designed to withstand snot. It holds up better.
4. Pick up a piece of brown paper bag and touch the bottom of it to the wallpaper paste so that when you pick it up it’s got maybe two inches covered with paste. (The biggest mistake folks make is to use too much paste). Smear it on both sides of the paper and crumple the piece. We’re trying to break up the fibers in the paper and work the paste into it. All techniques do this it’s just faster to do it with a large piece than lots of small pieces. What you want is for the paste to work inside rather than sitting on the surface.
5. Tear off a piece and place it in the mold or on the form. In a mold this is the layer that will be seen so it’s the only one that has to be neat. (On a form the last layer is the visible one so all layers have to be neat. You’ll just repeat all steps except six). Make sure that the piece is small enough that it doesn’t form wrinkles. Start in the center and work out. Overlap the pieces, pressing to remove airbubbles. When you get to the edge of the mold or form, go outside by at least an inch. You’ll need this to grab hold of when it’s time to take the papier-mache out.
6. MOLDS ONLY. After the whole layer is covered in brown. Get another piece of the bag, wet it in paste, and crumple it as before. Wad it up and shove it tightly into the detail areas. For instance, if you’ve got a nose, push it as far into the nose and nostrils as you can. What will happen is that the detailed areas will suddenly have ten layers of mache and the surface is smoother so your next layer will go faster.For this photo, I switched to white paper for my second layer and did the wads of paper with the brown so that it was easy for you to see.
7. Repeat steps 4-6 with the other paper, when it’s covered go back to the brown bag. Do this until you have between three to five layers. IMPORTANT do it while the layers are wet. They adhere better and you will have fewer airbubbles.
   Your final layer will be with whatever your first layer was. I only do three layers. You can see how much smoother the details are on this one than on the first layer.
8. Let it dry. Put it the sun. Be patient, you can put it in front of a space heater or bake it (250 degrees) but you risk the layers drying at different rates. I have to admit that in the winter I usually force it dry, because I’m not patient.
   What works really well, if you can find it, is an old standing hair dryer. It circulates the air and helps the thing dry evenly and pretty darn fast. The biggest challenge. If the top layer dries before the bottom layer — the one touching the plaster — then it will seal the moisture in and slow the bottom layer’s dry time. Make sense?
9. It will reach a stage we call leathery. It’s still flexible, but it’s dry, like leather. This is the best time to pull it out. Be careful, if it’s too early and you see wrinkles happening, don’t do it. It’s better to wait until its completely dry.
10. Peel off what tissue paper you can and the rest smooth down with the paste.
11. Trim the edges and then wrap them in papier-mache to keep them from peeling up.

You have to take some care with that first layer, but after that the subsequent layers go really, really fast. I can usually crank a single part mold out in forty-five minutes to an hour. It’s a pretty good ratio and the materials are dirt cheap.

I’ve dropped puppets from the second floor, hurled them against walls, and even stood on papier-mached pieces. Done right, the durability is surprising. The detail, going into a mold is pretty crisp, too. As a testament to that, here is the finished face of the wood witch.

To catch you up on what I spent the last several weeks building, I’m going to be posting some photos that I took during the build.

The wood witch needed hands capable of picking things up. Fortunately, you can find such a thing in your local neighborhood hardware store. This trick won’t work for a lot of puppets, but the wood witch was the perfect size for using grabber arms.

First thing was to rough cut and glue a piece of foam to the grabber arm to represent the other fingers. I’m using an ethafoam because it is stiff, but not rigid. I don’t want it to flop around but a rigid foam would be snap off.

I used a razor blade to carve the fingers into shape. I wanted something that looked like the grabber, but also was rootlike and a little, well, more finger-shaped.

I papier-mached the arm, leaving lots of wrinkles in the paper to give it a bark-like texture. We want the whole puppet to look like she’s made with a bundle of twigs.

And here they are finished. When I got to the arms, I switched to cloth mache. It will flex a little, if the fingers catch on something, but will give the same texture as the paper. I painted them with acrylic. Adding a few silk oak leaves to the hands and arms completed the picture.

• 03:25 Calling it a night and heading for home. #
• 13:52 Rob made pancakes. Mm. We’re listening to Madama Butterfly and then I’m heading out to buy fabric for the witches’ costumes. #
• 16:39 Finished the fabric shopping, got a little writing done on the subway and am at the puppet kitchen now. Time to shape blue foam. #
• 19:49 In NYC? Want to build puppets tomorrow? We need two volunteers from 11:00-3:00 at the Puppet Kitchen. You’ll be fed. #
• 23:13 I’m starting the last of the papier mache. The stone witch’s foot. #
• 23:31 Papier mache is done! Goo be gone. ((This, by the way, turned out to be wildly inaccurate.   I’ll have to do a buttload more tomorrow.)) #

The third witch is supposed to look as if she’s made of stone. I began with blue foam and roughed it out as if I were actually carving stone. The clay on the face is to give an example of what she would look like if she were wearing a mud mask as a disguise.

I paper-mached the pieces separately and then put a base coat of acrylic and spraypaint on the pieces. When I sprayed the pieces, I kept the black can very low, in relation to the pieces, so it only hit the high points with paint. This creates an illusion of shadows that are softer than what I can do with a brush.

And here she is glued together and painted. The designer, Michael Schupbach, wants her to look like she has gold inside, so I’ve painted the deep cracks with gold glitter paint.

The Woodwitch is supposed to look like she’s gathered a bunch of sticks and built herself out of them. I did a technical sketch on the large drawing of her and then dived in. This is the shoulder yoke. After cutting out the shape on the bandsaw, I drilled two holes for the support poles. These also allow me to put a saw through and cut out the middle.

It leaves crazy amounts of splinters and, um, my cut was not exactly symmetrical.

Fortunately, with the aid of my dremel tool I was able to take care of both problems at once. Even when the edges are as egregiously rough as that, I always hit the corners with the sander to soften then. I don’t want a sharp edge chewing through a puppet or puppeteer.

Now this bit I’m pleased with. The supports from the shoulders come down to a point. I’m using bamboo for them because it’s incredibly light and strong. The only problem with it is that you can’t drill holes in it without seriously compromising the structural integrity. The solution is to basically tie it together. By adding this little block in — see how nicely I’ve created a hollow to cup the rods — I’m able to glue as well as tying the rods.

For the hip plate I’ve taken a two inch thick piece of bass wood and shaped the hips and handle out of one piece. There is an interesting tendency for comfortable handgrips to have an, um, distinctive shape.

I bought a whole bunch of fake greenery in the floral district and stripped the ends of it to expose the wire inside.

This gets wired to the hips so that the twig skirt has a solid base.

A continuous piece of spring steel goes from the hip plate, held in place with plumbers epoxy, and up to that cute little triangle wedge I cut earlier.

So here she is with her branches installed. I’ll be treating the grabber arms so they look like branches as well. She gets a dress which will cover the midriff and a new head.

This is the sculpture of the witch’s head. I’ll have shots of making the head later.

For the fog witch, I start with roughing out the form in styrofoam and clay. You can see that I have it on a simple stand.

Here’s the basic sculpture, without the ears, and the drawing Michael Schupbach, the designer, gave me. I’m pretty pleased by the resemblance to the drawing.

I’ve added in the ear armature here. I initially thought I would do the ears separately and then add them, but changed my mind. I have to have an armature because the clay would droop sadly and fall off the sculpture otherwise.

Now here’s where things get interesting. We got feedback from the director that the character needed to be less angry and more childlike and inquisitive. So I adjusted the sculpture like so.

One of the things that fascinates me is how much of a difference a tiny change can make. I’ve removed the wrinkles, given it less of a rosebud mouth and more of whimsical bent. It looks like a profoundly different character.

I sculpted heads of two other charactersalso, but you just get the process shots of this one.

These puppets at their base, are rod puppets, mostly with internal rods. What you’re looking at here is the grip and shoulder bar of the fog witch. The grip is the bit that looks like a ray gun. Now, normally, I wouldn’t have the shoulders above the grip, but in her case, her head is even with her shoulders, so it makes sense.

Take a look at the handle. The ergonomics of a control often gets ignored by a lot of puppeteers. Lord knows I did until I had a nasty wrist injury. My occupational therapist at the time rebuilt the handles of several of my puppets and totally changed the way I build puppets. Ideally, you don’t want to have to grip the puppet, because a) the energy that you spend on doing that is tiring and b) the added tension makes your performance less fluid.

This one is called a basic pistol grip, for obvious reasons. See the little nubbin at the top right of the handle? That’s to keep your hand from sliding up the handle. At the base is another nub which cups under the bottom of your hand and adds some stability. You can release your thumb and loosen your fingers with this handle and the puppet will stay in your hand.

The idea is that you want to leave the muscles in your hand free for fine manipulation and use the larger muscles in your arm and shoulder for the lifting. Make sense?

When this is finished, I’ll wrap it with cork tape or leather to control sweating and give a little bit of traction.

We don’t want a lot of visible structure in the fog witch, so I’m making the arms out of spring steel. It’s tough enough that cutting it with wire cutters is difficult, but a dremel tool with a cutting blade works just fine.

This photo shows me prepping for that. I’m not crazy enough to try to take pictures and run power tools at the same time. Were I really cutting sparks would be flying.

As they are here! I’m blunting the ends of the wire so that it doesn’t poke out and cut someone or cause wear in the puppet.

Along those lines, I cap the ends of the wire with leather — well, in this case, plether, so that the wire won’t rub directly against the fabric.

The elbows of this character are a very simple cloth joint. This allows movement in any direction, which is handy because the shoulders of this character rotate in a fixed plane.

Basically, I lay my spring steel on a piece of cloth, glue it down, then fold the cloth over to make a tube and glue it in place around the steel

There are other more graceful ways to make a shoulder joint, but this deals with most of the issues I have. I needed the joint to rotate at the center of the shoulder bar, instead of being attached to the top or bottom. I bent the wire into a box shape, slipped two cotter pins on it and then placed those at the ends of my shoulder bar.

The problem with this joint is that the wire wants to slip through the cotter pins. I used leather stops to control that, but it’s not particularly clean. I’d rather have used shaft collar, but there weren’t any in the shop.

I’m using elastic cord to spring the shoulders so they are upright. The fog witch’s elbows point to the sky.

So here’s what I did yesterday.

The concept for this build is that each of the three witches has created her corporeal form out of things she’s found in the woods. So one is made of stone, one of sticks and the other of mist. I’m starting with the stone witch because she will be labor intensive and yet at the same time is fairly easy technically.

Michael Schupbach, the designer, did full scale drawings for me so that as I work on designing their internal structure I know how much space I have in which to work. We’ve got front and side views of each character, though for the moment I’m only showing you the stone witch.

Though it’s hard to see in this photo (sorry, no flash) what I do is draw where the puppeteers body needs to be in relationship to the figure. Those are the faint read marks. I make adjustments to the drawings to acomodate that as well as to try to make the puppet at least a little ergonomic.

In this case, I’m running a channel in through the figure so the puppeteer doesn’t have to hold their arm straight out in front of them. It’s still going to be a significant amount of weight, but I’ve tried to go for the strongest position possible considering scale and operation of the figure.

Next is the usual pattern making and cutting of blue foam.

As a side note, I had to travel over to Brooklyn to pick up the foam. The trip there is pretty fast, maybe twenty minutes. The trip back however, included eight foot long sheets of foam, the subway, and wind. It’s times like this that I love New Yorkers, because we’ve all had to carry the horrifically oversized thing on the subway, people tend to be really helpful. I think it’s the only time you see pity.

So I had folks holding doors for me and being generally quite nice all the way.

Then I got off the train and the wind picked up. It was like walking with a parasail. That was seriously unpleasant. By the time I got back to the shop I hated the entire world again.

Here’s the witch’s torso and leg roughed in. Again, I’m concerned about the weight, even with foam this is going to get tiring to hold, so we’ve opted to go for a rigid leg to support the weight. Since the character is supposed to be made of stone, it’s not necessary for her to have naturalistic movement. Normally I’d want that knee to bend but this will be easier.

I should mention that the puppeteers are high school aged girls, so weight and ease of operation are going to be key for the whole build.

Today wasn’t very exciting in terms of having photos to offer you.  We met with Emily De Cola, who’s directing the puppet movement to talk about the physical requirements of the figures.  I also headed into the garment district to pick up fabric swatches.  These are going to be beautiful but creepy puppets.