Losing weight

Now comes the slightly scary step of hollowing out the head and torso in order to reduce the weight of the puppet.  This involves splitting these parts in half with chisel and mallet, drilling out the middle sections and then sticking it all back together again with wood glue.  This makes the puppet significantly lighter, which is good news for the puppeteer.

The head just after splitting in two

Hollowing out the centre of the head

Recovering post surgery

Splitting the torso in half

Torso before hollowing out

The Birth of Monkey Number Two

Today I am cutting out all the pieces required for Monkey Number Two, which is going to be the slightly larger male monkey.  It will be much quicker to carve this puppet, since it is essentially a scaled-up replica of the first, and I have already solved all the technical conundrums.  Here is Monkey Number One (still to be named) reclining on the block of jelutong from which her companion will emerge.  A curious mutation of the Genesis creation story!

I have found the enlargement function on my photocopier to be an invaluable tool for scaling up my original designs.  These are then transferred on to the wood using carbon paper and tracing paper.  It takes some thought to determine the configuration that makes best use of the wood.

A good few hours later, here are the bandsawed parts on the right, still very heavy and bulky but ready now to be carved.

First Steps

Hurray! The feet are now attached to the legs, which makes a big difference to the monkeyness of the puppet.  It's a beautiful day, so we've gone outside to try some first steps :o)

Standing, knees slightly bent

Detail of feet

Soles of feet

Sitting posture

Crawling posture

Me and the monkey

Carving the feet

Although the majority of the puppets are carved from jelutong, I am using lime for the hands and feet, as it is denser wood so should take the extra wear and tear from contact with the stage when walking or crawling.  Having cut out the hands and feet this weekend on a bandsaw, this morning I have been working on the feet.  Whilst carving, they are kept joined together so that it is easier to clamp them.

The cut out feet before starting to carve

Sloping the toes down from the high points of the knuckles

Defining the separate toes and knuckles

 I have also sloped the wood up towards the toes on the sole of the feet, which helps the puppet to walk without catching its feet on the floor.

The importance of not losing your head!

Here is the monkey a week later, with the right contours starting to emerge, the elbow and knee joints operational and the neck sitting nicely inside its socket within the torso and moving in the way I envisaged.  That makes it sound easy!  It is very much a cycle of trial and error, always balancing the form of the monkey against the functional requirements of each joint.  Anyway, you can see from the photo below the socket in the top of the torso that the rounded neck sits in.  The socket is pretty deep and the neck is correspondingly long.  Why?  Well it's so that when the monkey cranes its neck backwards or forwards you don't see a gaping big hole between the body and the head.  There is a largish screw eye embedded into the neck and the bottom of the socket.  They are embedded so that they don't protrude into the joint and stop the neck sitting at the bottom of the socket.  I experimented with fastening a loop of wire between the two screw eyes, but the problem was that its rigidity didn't allow the neck to move enough within the socket to achieve the range of movement required.  I found that strong elastic cord worked better, pulled tight and tied in a double knot.  This is fine during the development of the puppet,  but when it is finally assembled I think the elastic will need to be sewn or glued or both so that the head doesn't fall off during the show!  A big no no!  Apparently though some Chinese marionettes don't actually have the heads fixed to the bodies, and they just rely on gravity to keep them sitting in their sockets.  Hmm.  Tempting, but these monkeys will be rather athletic and may even do handstands, so yes, we will need elastic.