I'm playing around with some potential puppet designs, keeping them to just one page is more manageable for me so I don't marry myself entirely to one idea and have room to explore other ideas without getting carried away. I'm thinking of drafting a design for a sphinx next ^^!
Puppet rambling under the cut <3
First little design experiment was using a Kelpie as inspiration ( a kelpie made of kelp, original I know lol). I normally start drawing at the bottom of a page and work up, for some reason, so you can see my original design and how it progresses from big bulky horse to spindly strange creature which I ended up liking a lot more. I liked the idea of it being a normal-ish horse from one side and next being this skeletal water rotted creature, equally I like the strange, spindly, more-cat-then-horse-like creature it ended up being so I think the end result would be trying to find a happy medium between the two. As for materials I was looking towards (surprising no one, my favourite puppet designer) Toby Olie who has a wonderful eye for fabric in his work.
First example is 'A Christmas Carol' and the second is 'Wolves in the walls' both of which he uses these wonderful scrappy fabrics to give such vibrant character to his puppets. In particular I liked the sinister quality given to the wolf puppets through the use of hemp material for their fur which is why I would use something similar, either that or well worn calico. Painted or stained a sickly sort of green.
For the hair I would use a rubber of some sort, best case would be something semi-transparent to give the illusion of seaweed. Partially for that seaweed effect but also for the sound, to echo the sickly, off-putting vibes im going for I would want something that would create a strange sound when it moves, something with almost a sticky, heavy quality to it harkening back to the mythos of Kelpies (the whole, you touch 'em you're stuck to 'em thing).
The design then graduated to more of a unicorn aesthetic, something that should be pure and good hearted, a lure to get people to come see and pet it. I favour the stylisation of Amalthea from the last unicorn, lanky but with a strange ethereal quality. And then it morphed in to a more cat like creature... somehow. I think I was more thinking of a trickster spirit for my Kelpie, something that looks kind and alluring to ensnare its prey :3
Part of my dissertation was on the line between costume and puppet so something I always try and include in my designs is this idea of disguising the pupeteer so the puppet take centre stage whilst also marrying their costume design into the puppet character they play. In this instance I was inspired, again, by the idea of the Kelpie attaching itself to its victim and dragging them in to drown them so I had designed the puppeteer to be one of the Kelpie's most recent victims.
