Lunch!

Taking shape

Gradually the monkey is emerging and taking shape.  It's great to get into the carving, accompanied by Rachmaninov's 3rd piano concerto, which helps me get into the flow.  Here is progress so far on the head.  The ears are going to be made separately and glued on at the end.  The eyes will be hollow sockets.  At the moment the head is still slightly square, so needs to be rounded off further.  I'm also contemplating how to tackle the tufty sideburns that rhesus macaques monkeys often have.

Here is the left leg, also needing more rounding, but I will do this once the knee joint has taken shape.  I'm working simultaneously on the torso, legs and head, so that I can fine tune how the joints fit together.   Since monkeys rarely stand fully upright, I am designing the knees so that the legs do not straighten up completely.

Inside the Arcola Tent

Today Emma and I paid a visit to the Arcola Tent, which is where Baba Shakespeare will be performed in the spring.  Emma and I will be operating the monkey marionettes, and we wanted to get a feel for the space and what we can achieve within it.  It was exciting to get in there and see what it is like.  We took Junkie Monkey so that we could experiment with a puppet and try out some initial ideas for the performance.

Chop Chop!

It is time for me to cut out my designs on a bandsaw.  First the front and side elevations are transferred onto the wood, which has been squared up using a plane.  Below you can see the right lower leg under the pillar drill.  The holes for the joints are drilled whilst the wood is still square, which makes it much easier to get them nice and straight.

Below is the female monkey in a very primitive state, with all the wood still around the drawings.  Before bandsaws were around, this excess wood had to be removed by hand with a large chisel, but now this can be done faster and more accurately with a machine.  The wood here is jelutong; the hands and feet will be made later on out of lime.

Here is some bandsawing going on.  The trick is to cut out the first side of the design but not all the way round; if you leave tiny sections still attached, then the wood doesn't come off, which means you can turn the block over to cut out the second side and the base of the wood is still flat.  At the end you can go back and remove the wood around the first elevation using the bandsaw or a coping saw.

Here is the monkey post bandsaw, still looking a little strange but that will soon change once I start carving and the hard edges get taken off.

Junkie monkey finding her feet

Late last night I finished junkie monkey.  Here is a 3 minute video of her trying out some moves on the kitchen table.  It's lovely when you first finish a puppet, however rough, and get to bring it to life for the first time.

I'm pleased with the range of movements I can get with this marionette: standing, crawling and sitting.  Ideally the knee joints would be a bit looser, but it's definitely helpful to have a rough puppet to play with while we try out ideas for the show.  The control is an upright one normally used for human marionettes (animals tend to have horizontal controls).  Although the monkeys will probably need to crawl as well as sit and stand, because they are performing monkeys I think they will spend more time upright, so it is likely that the controls will a slightly modified version of the upright control.

Junkie Monkey

This evening I got the urge to make a quick monkey marionette out of stuff from my junk box, to be finished tomorrow evening.  This will give us something to play with when trying out ideas for the puppetry sequence in Baba Shakespeare.  Even when making a puppet out of these kind of materials, care still needs to be taken over the way the joints are made, so that it moves as realistically as possible.  The beads inside are not to show what this monkey has been eating for dinner (they may look like nuts but in fact they are wooden beads!) but to add weight to the body so that it has a similar feel to a wooden marionette.  She looks a bit glum but will probably cheer up when she gets her paws :o)  For now she's just chilling out sitting in my basket of beads.

Planing the wood

It is important to plane the blocks for two reasons: firstly so that all the faces are flat and perpendicular to each other, which is important when cutting out the designs on a bandsaw, and secondly so that the dirty surface of the wood is removed.  It is not good for your chisels to cut through gunk and grime.  This is also why planing the wood is better than sanding it flat.  Sandpaper leaves lots of grit on the wood, which would have to be brushed off before starting to carve.

The first cut

My father's favourite maxim is "measure twice, cut once", and with his advice ringing in my ears, I have spent quite a lot of time considering & reconsidering the design.  Now that I feel satisfied with my drawings, it is time to saw some blocks of those great big planks of wood.

Of course, it would be quicker to use a bandsaw, but in the absence of such a luxury I have resorted to the good old handsaw.  Plus it's a quick way to warm up in a cold workshop!

Scaling up to full height

The photocopier came into its own today when it came to scaling up my original paper design.  At full standing height this measured 16.5 inches.  My first enlargement attempt did not reach the full 20 inches I was aiming for, but it was a case of third time lucky, so now I have the side elevation at the correct scale for the female monkey, plus two redundant smaller versions.