Making a Stop Motion Puppet Pt 1

What you'll need

Wire:

I use 18mm aluminum wire that my dad was able to find at work since it wouldn't cost me anything.  You can find the industry standard and recommended armature wire online. Or if you don't want to wait for the wire to ship, you can try and find wire at the hardware store. 

(I wasn't able to find wire at Lowes and I'm not sure if Ace Hardware, HomeDepot or Harbor Freight carries it but it could be worth a look)

I wouldn't use steel wire. I made my first wire armature with steel wire but it was not as easy to move as aluminum wire making it a bit tough to animate. 

Epoxy Putty:

This will hold together your armature. It's not as cheap as I was hoping but for $7 you can get the cheapest one and that should work. I used this:

I don't know if you have to worry about different putties acting differently or not since really we just want it to get hard. So you should have to worry about wether it says metal weld or plastic weld. I say cheapest is best. 

Step 1 planning: 

I is best to draw out a plan for your characters body so you can make sure that everything will work in the end. Also this will allow you to play with the scale of your character before spending the time to make the armature. 

For my second character I didn't have to make a plan when I redid the body because I went off of the space suite size that I had made so the armature fit properly. 

Step 2 Shaping:

This step is relatively easy. When you have your plan take the wire and start with one foot and then shape the hips and then going into the spine and neck then down for the other side. In the end you will have something like what is pictured above. 

For this armature I repeated this two times giving me three main Body wires. This will help the armature hold itself up when you have it tied down on the stage. 

Next:

We have to renforce the legs by adding additional wire. I make essentially an upside down U shape with a couple more pieces and then wrap that with the legs. 

In this armature I used two extra pieces with the legs making a total of five wires for the legs. 

I do nearly the same thing for the arms. With a drawn plan you can cut a couple of wires to the desired length. When you go to attach them you will want to have them bent where the shoulder width will be for your puppet. 

Attach the arms by twisting the spine wires together and putting the arms at the desired height in the twist. 

Step 3 Epoxy:

With the epoxy putty it is good to mix sections of the putty at a time so that you can spend time to shape what you need to. If it looks like this picture, keep mixing it!!

To start mix a portion of the epoxy until the marbling is gone. Then shape the hips and then the chest. It is a little easier if you do the chest second because the arms like to move around if you do it first and then the hips second. 

Next, take pieces of putty and make the bones on the arms and legs. Make sure to leave a gap for the shoulder, elbow, hip, knee, hands and feet. I leave about 1/4 inch of space for these spots. Although you can really just eyeball a fair distance.

The epoxy that I used sets in 25 minutes and fully cures in three hours.

Follow my blog! Part two to be posted soon.