Puppet Name: Pierre The Imagination Fox

Pattern: None

Materials: Sponge, hot glue, foam clay, poly fill, felt, cut fabric, paint, neodymium magnets, contact cement

Arm type: Live Hands

Features: Removable tail, eyelid Mechanism

After my Secondary 3 End-of-Year examinations, I decided to challenge myself to create a puppet more advanced than I had built. Pierre was initially an exercise in building a live hand puppet with a mechanism. He is a departure from my cardboard and clay puppets as he is mostly composed of sculpted sponge.

One day before Easter, I tried to improve the stiff jaw he was cursed with and ripped it out to replace it. But alas, the impromptu surgery turned out to be sloppier than expected. This started a several-months journey to restore Pierre back to his former self. It was only two weeks ago when I finally finished the restoration, allowing myself to finally rest.

Before I started the building process, I took time to plan out a design, drawing out a quick reference sheet for a fox character that would work for the style of puppet I was trying out.

As stated above, his head is composed of sculpted foam. Despite my increased supply of foam, there was still some limit to what I could use. I glued thin slices of sponge together in a rough square shape to make the top half of the head, and used smaller scraps of sponge with wire shoved inside to create the bottom half. From there, I cut out an area for his mouth and eyes to rest in.

His mouth was a length of foam folded in half with more foam sculpted and glued at the ends to create a muzzle and lower jaw. Padding was added to make holding fingers inside easier. Initially attached to the head with hot glue, during the restoration contact cement was utilised in gluing areas around and inside the mouth so that it retained flexibility.

The eyes are two ping-pong balls with metal wire running through, bending into the back of the eyes and ending in a lever. When pushing down on this lever, piecesor wire running at the front moved upwards, creating a moving eyelid effect. The lever was originally controlled by the index finger, this was later changed to be controlled by the pinkie finger as the jaw required more strength to move, which the pinkie finger could not provide.