Stop Motion by Susannah Shaw. Reprinted with permission.

Making Your Own Puppet
The best way of controlling the model’s shape and movement is to give it a skeleton, or armature. A basic armature can be made reasonably cheaply, with wire. The best wire to use is aluminum, which comes in several thicknesses. Twisting two or three strands together in a slow drill can prolong its use. If you can’t afford aluminum wire, you could use tin wire, but tin is more springy (has more memory) than aluminum, and will therefore make animation much harder. There are many ways you could choose to design your armature.

If you are making an armature for your puppet, it is best to keep it to the sizes mentioned above. Anything with an armature cannot be made much bigger or smaller because of the sizes of the parts you will be using. Plan your armature by drawing it out. The model described below has been designed with low cost in mind — it’s the same model we’ve used throughout for the animated sequences, so her flexibility is demonstrated. She is made with a variety of materials each dependent on a different model making process. This puppet should cost between £150-£200 to make. In Chapter 6 I go into more detail of professional processes; it may be worth referring forward. First of all get three lengths of 1.5mm wire twisted together by holding them in a drill running on slow, to make the limbs and the spine and a single strand of 1mm wire for the wrists, looped round a washer for the palm, and twisted. If an armature for Plasticine is too strong, when trying to animate the puppet you will simply poke the wire through. Because of this, our puppet only has wire in the wrist and not the fingers. It makes animating the hands a lot easier and less restrictive.

Glueing wire armature. All puppet making images courtesy ScaryCat Studio.

It’s always a good idea to be able to remove head, hands and feet, as they often need extra work — so glue on a section of square brass sleeving K&S of sizes that will slot into each other for arms and hands, and head and neck. K&S is square brass tubing that you can buy in any model shop. It comes in different sizes allowing a smaller size to fit into a larger, giving a firm, well-located joint. (K&S is only available in imperial sizes.) An M3 nut is soldered onto the larger piece of K&S at the wrist, neck and ankles. This allows the grub screw to be used to hold the smaller size of K&S in place. This in turn holds the wire in place. The strands of wire are then epoxy glued into the relevant pieces of K&S to form the armature. Washers are epoxy glued to the wrist wire to form the palm of the hand.

To keep definition of the elbows and knees, strengthen the upper and lower arms, and the thighs and calves of the figure by feeding the twisted aluminum through a short length of brass sleeving. Leave enough space for the wire to bend so that the strain is not always on exactly the same spot. Too small a gap between them will make it easier to break.

Steel plate cut with a junior hacksaw, is soldered to the three pieces of K&S on chest piece using silver solder.