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Hey friends! did you know this Sunday, March 21st, the museum will be celebrating the International Day of Puppetry? It's my favorite day of the year! I sat down with my good pal Aaron Rose, Please Touch Museum Theater Performer, and he told me all about what's in store for the day:

Pinky: What’s the International Day of Puppetry all about?

Aaron: The International Day of Puppetry is a day to celebrate puppetry. And not just one type of puppetry but ALL types of puppetry. Puppetry is the art of making or operating puppets. A person who makes or operates puppets is called a puppeteer.

Pinky: You mean the person with me all the time is named “Puppeteer”? I thought her name was Alice.

Aaron: Well, you’re right. The person is called “a puppeteer”; but that is not her name, it is her job, like being a teacher or a doctor. A teacher’s job is to help people learn, and a doctor’s job is to help people be healthy. A puppeteer’s job is to work with puppets to help people imagine and laugh.



Pinky: How are we celebrating International Day of Puppetry here at the museum and why are we celebrating it?

Aaron: We are celebrating by having the entire day dedicated to all kinds of puppetry and puppet. Puppetry is a very important part of what we do here at PTM. We use it in our theater shows, out on the gallery floor, in our Program Room, and in our special events. We use it everywhere! Puppets are special because they can be used in many ways. For instance, they can teach us about new and exciting things, listen to our stories, help us to not to be afraid, and of course make us laugh or feel happy when we are feeling sad. International Day of Puppetry is a day to celebrate all of the things that puppets and puppeteers do for us. We celebrate YOU, Pinky. If we didn’t have puppetry or puppets, then we would not have you.

Pinky: What kinds of music, art and literacy activities are planned? How are they educational?

Aaron: We are very excited to have on exhibition, a collection of traditional Malian puppet and mask pieces on loan to us from Mary Sue & Paul Peter Rosen in an exhibit titled “Sogo Bo: The Animals Come Forth”. These are all traditional Malian puppets and masks, which tell stories of Malian traditions, lifestyle and folklore. We will have them on display outside the Please Touch Playhouse and in the Program Room from March 19th until May 31st.

Our “Hide and Seek of the Week” will feature a puppet for everyone one to find on their own scavenger hunt. The Playhouse Theater will feature an interactive puppet show called “There’s Something Under My Bed”. There will be special dance parties with marionettes. Plus, PTM puppeteers and Puppet Pals will be strolling around the museum saying hello to everyone. In our Program Room, visitors can build their own puppets, help decorate our recycled puppet stage, and explore other puppet activities. In the Story Castle, the story times will feature books about puppets and toys that come to life. We will also be introducing a BRAND NEW PTM PUPPET PAL that day! I am really excited to meet him (or her). Also, ALL puppets in the Kids Store will be 20% off on that day

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So you may have already heard that there’s going to be a Higglety Pigglety Pop! short film as a bonus feature on the Where the Wild Things Are Blu-Ray, which is coming out March 2. Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life is of course the other major chidren’s book by Maurice Sendak. It’s a surreal story about a dog looking for Experience.

The film is semi-animated (there are puppets involved) by the filmmakers of Madame Tutli-Putli and includes the voice-acting of Meryl Streep (Jennie), Forest Whitaker (Lion), Spike Jonze (Plant). The production design – as in Tutli Putli - is rich and stunning. Streep is perfect as usual.

Two more clips after the jump…

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Read the rest of Clips from the new Higglety Pigglety Pop! film

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Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Animation, clyde henry, film, forest whitaker, higglety pigglety pop, meryl streep, Montreal, movies, puppets, Spike Jonze", Where the Wild Things Are

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I've mentioned before that I really like puppets. I think these guys from the World Through Wooden Eyes website are just so darn cute. I wish I was in Glasgow so I could take one of their workshops.

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Thanksgiving is almost here--fun with the family and lots of luscious food. But if you want to have some creative fun this Thanksgiving, here is a link to HIGHLIGHTS magazine. You'll learn how to make your very own TURKEY FINGER PUPPET.

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I have been so absorbed in projects that I haven’t had a chance to celebrate that my newest book, My Abuelita, written by Tony Johnston, has hit the shelves this fall. There are many reasons for me to be excited about this book, but the most important one is that it was a challenge to illustrate it, and that I did it.
And so, in the spirit of a little release celebration, I though I would show how My Abuelita was made.
Care to find out?

Making My Abuelita from Yuyi Morales on Vimeo.

Six years. In 2003, when I signed the contract to create the illustrations for My Abuelita, written by Tony Johnston, I didn’t anticipate that it would take me this long to see the work completed. But at the time I had other books to finish before I could begin any new project, and so time began to pass.

Time passing is a good opportunity for daydreaming. Daydreaming is an opportunity for imagining. And imagining is how my illustrations start.

During the years I needed to complete other books, I imagined how the illustrations for My Abuelita would look someday. When it comes to my work, I don’t really imagine things like a character’s features or the colors of skin and clothes. Instead, I imagine possibilities. And so I began imagining the possibility of making the illustrations for My Abuelita not with paintings, as I had done with all of my previous books, but utilizing something I had long adored: dolls and puppets.

When I had just arrived in the USA from Mexico, I fell in love with making puppets. I learned about it from books I borrowed from the library. It was through making puppets that I began exploring the creation of my own stories and characters, which eventually led me to create my own books. Yet I have never stopped loving the wonder of inanimate objects moving, posing, and coming alive to enact stories.

The more imagining I did, the crazier the idea of using puppets became. This seemed like a project that would require many different kinds of techniques: sculpting, sewing, painting, photography, digital work. Could I really do this all by myself? How was I going to make rigid puppets have facial expression? What would happen to the curved lines I like to use in my work? Could I still keep a sense of movement flooding my illustrations if I had to build them rather than paint them? Would I need to hire a photographer, and would he or she be in tune with the vision I had of my work? And more important, what would my publisher think about it? (They scratched their chins. “Let us see,” they said. “Try it.”)

In 2006 I finally started working on My Abuelita, a story of a grandmother and her grandchild living together and bonding through imagination and storytelling. By then I had closed my eyes to my own doubts. I had decided to use puppets and props to make scenes, buy my husband, Tim, the camera he’d always wanted, and finish the illustrations using digital media. There were still plenty of things I didn’t know how I would do, but I trusted that I would find a way of learning—I would study or ask people to teach me, and one way or another I would figure it all out.

The work began with bad drawings, as usual. My first attempts always produce the simplest and roughest drawings. They are stick people without features or details—pure shape and energy. Later, based on the text, I began refining my drawings to conjure this grandmother shaped like a pumpkin, her loving grandchild, and their cat, Frida Kahlo.
As I was establishing the look of my characters in sketches, I began working on thumbnails, small drawings where I concentrate on the compositional and storytelling elements of the 32 pages of the book. While in the past I have used my thumbnails as the road map for drawing refined sketches and ultimately paintings, this time my thumbnails were the reference for creating three-dimensional scenes. In these thumbnails, all of the characters, places, situations, attitudes, and objects in every scene were established.

With my general plan for the book visually laid down, it was time to begin building the characters and elements that would appear in the illustrations. I wrote down a list so that I would not forget anyone.

I have made puppets before; papier-mâché pulp is my favorite construction material. But I knew that My Abuelita needed puppets that would withstand extensive maneuvering. I would need to position them in diverse poses and attitudes, and they would need to stay. So I began studying stop-motion animation techniques.

On a wire structure I built by twisting wire and wrapping silk thread, I sculpted my characters. I used polymer clay, which stays soft and malleable while working, but hardens when baked in a kitchen oven. Because I needed my characters to move, I left bare wire joints for the neck, knees, wrist, fingers, waists, and more. Later I would cover the joints digitally. Once baked and hardened, I primed the figures and began to paint them. I decided then to give my puppets features but not expressions (including no eyes), so that later I could create expressions digitally for the different moments in the story.

For Frida the cat, I mulled over how to make her fuzzy. I found my answer in felting. Using a special needle with an indentation on the tip, I learned to clump felt fibers over my wire cat skeleton and sculpt them into the shape I wanted. The hair of Abuelita and her grandchild were also made with this technique.

Next I sewed their little dresses, pants, and shirts. The boy’s shirt is my favorite because I put it together with fabric printed with motifs based on a Mexican Loteria game. El corazón card became the front; el pájaro card is on the back. For many of the linens and clothes, I bought fabrics and laces in Mexico; many are common fabrics that have been used for generations.

Everything from little bedroom slippers to little toys, beds, spoons, a feathered crown, and more had to be created. I painted the image of the artist Frida Kahlo with my computer, printed it on fabric, then sewed it into a lace pillow for Abuelita. Some objects, like Abuelita’s iron bed, I designed while I was in Mexico visiting my family. There I found a metal worker who, following my drawing, cut and soldered the bed for me. Other elements, like the clay dishes Abuelita and her grandchild use at breakfast, are toy crafts played with by children in Mexico. I bought mine in el mercado, my hometown’s market. To create the metal mirror in Abuelita’s house, I embossed a sheet of aluminum foil in the style of traditional Mexican silver works.

My Abuelita is a story that honors both everyday life and imagination. These two worlds come together in the story, and they needed to come together in the illustrations as well, while still being distinguishable from each other. But how? I decided to depict the real world of Abuelita’s family with my three-dimensional creations; their imaginary world would be portrayed in my paintings.

And so the images began developing through an amalgam of different techniques. In my husband’s photography studio, we propped up the walls of Abuelita’s house, which were boards that I textured and painted. Using my early thumbnails as storyboards, we furnished every scene with the props I had made, and we positioned the puppets as they enacted the story in front of the camera. Depending on their complexity, setting up the scenes to be photographed took from one to three days each.

Lighting played a big role. From illuminating the general scene to adding glow and shadows to each puppet, the process was handled by Tim. He listened to and interpreted my lighting wishes, experimented with different approaches, positioned photographic lamps, and even constructed miniature reflectors and small light boxes in order to concentrate light on the smallest of characters.

Eighteen high-resolution photographs were taken to create the book. One by one I uploaded them to my computer so that I could digitally finish in Photoshop. The list of work to do was long:

Abuelita, her grandchild, and Frida Khalo the cat had to be given eyes and expression. Sometimes whole eyelids, mouths, and cheeks were digitally destructed and reconstructed in order to give their faces a more realistic expression.

Skin was built wherever bare wire joints showed. Fingers and toes were repositioned so that they would be in visual tune with what the characters were doing and feeling.

Some scenes required that new glows and shadows be manually redrawn.

Real food was cooked, photographed, and digitally served in the photographed dishes.

A model car that was smaller than we needed had to be seamlessly adapted to the driving scene.

The alligator clamps, clay, pins, strings, and any other tools that kept the puppets, floors, walls, and props in place had to be erased.

And the list continued.

One of the last steps was the blending of the imaginary world with the real one: my paintings had to be integrated into the photographs. Using my computer, I layered every photograph with a painting, one on top of the other, and blended them together as one. I erased some parts and redrew others. I extracted or copied pieces of the images, grabbing colors and textures, and then moved them where I needed them. In a way this felt as if I were sculpting the illustrations—not much different than my adding, extracting, and moving clay when I sculpted my puppets over the wire armature.

Then, after about three years, I was done!

Illustrating is a series of choices. I give voice to my work by choosing ideas, possibilities, and ways of using art (and not my ability to draw, my painting skills, or how good or bad I am at anything). I hope that the way I chose to tell the story of My Abuelita comes out with a voice “as round as dimes and as wild as blossoms blooming” and that even Abuelita would be proud.

Now that My Abuelita is long finished and is already a completed book, what I keep closest to me is that fantastic feeling of being at the studio, setting the puppets in the scenes. No matter how tired I was or how many times we reset the puppets (which often moved or fell, crashing the whole scene), it always made me squirm with pure delight to have Abuelita, her grandchild, and Frida the cat bring to life a scene I had only imagined. How I had dreamed of this perfect moment, ever since I was a child playing with my dolls.

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I've been thinking about making cartoons and writing down some thoughts. Harry and Silvio really inspires a certain thoughtfulness in me. I'll write more as I can sort out my thoughts but here are a few lines of notes from my sketchbook.

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Last night we all jumped in the car after school and raced to Leeds to go and watch the beautifully crafted staging of Little Leap Forward. Adapted from the book, by Guo Yue and Clare Farrow, illustrated by Helen Cann and published by Barefoot Books, it tells the story of events from Yue’s own childhood set against Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China.

A powerful combination of masked actors, puppets and shadow-box/animation, not to mention an atmospheric score and cleverly versatile set, the story is told “only” through mime. We followed Little Leap Forward’s dawning awareness of the importance of freedom, both through the political events unfolding around him and through his love for a songbird captured for him by his best friend. No matter how much Little Leap Forward coaxes and bribes with seeds, the bird cannot sing from within the confines of a cage. A “scary” dream sequence that had Little Brother on the edge of his seat alerts Little Leap Forward to what he has to do and he sets the bird free.

I have to say that this particular performance will be looked back on by us - and probably by the cast - with very mixed feelings. There was a group of children in the audience from a local School for the Deaf, who were entranced - picking up enough of the vibrations of the music to get a feel for it, and able to particpate fully in the action on stage. Wonderful. However, the first three rows were taken up by a youth-group outing and it very soon became evident that the children did not know how to behave in a public, live performance. All the more credit to the production, then, that in the scene when Red Guards arrest Little Leap Forward’s mother (an event related in Guo Yue and Clare Farrow’s book for adults, Music, Food and Love), there was not a sound from the auditorium.

Afterwards, the four actors/puppeteers gave a short talk to these children (which we gate-crashed!) and again, they captivated their audience. I couldn’t help thinking what a pity it was that the children had obviously not had any sort of introduction to what they were going to see… I wonder how many would have liked to turn the clock back and engage with it more fully, once they’d had a chance to find out a bit more about it?

Little Leap Forward is on tour in England until 17 July - for further details, look here. In the meantime, watch this short video

and read the production blog. If you haven’t come across the book yet, watch this very moving introduction, narrated by Yue and featuring his magical flute-playing; and read our review, here on PaperTigers.

Little Leap Forward was definitely a production not to be missed: a big thank you to Nicky Fearn, Frances Merriman, Jonny Quick and Mark Whitaker, the faces behind the masks; and to Gemma Bonham of The Carriageworks, for an empathetic discussion afterwards.

* Photograph credit: Ian Tilton

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Okay this is probably more appropriate for "fold" rather than "unfold" but I guess you have to unfold him to make his mouth open. I've been making these silly little puppets this week. I thought they would be more fun then just creating a plain old coloring page. Here's a photo of the monster one I made. I created a PDF of the monster puppet along with folding instructions if anyone wants to make their own.

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I've added a new activity to my website. This is a super simple paper folding project. All you need a sheet of paper and some crayons and you can have your very own pet monster. Click here to download puppets and folding instructions. When you print your monster turn off the "scale to page" option or the face might not line up with the folds properly.

Also visit the kid's section of my website to check out more activities and coloring pages.

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Scott C. (aka Scott Campbell) recently posted a slew of images from his recent gallery show, Home Slice. The show is made up of some of Scott’s trademark watercolour paintings of tiny characters and their bizarre, surreal environments. In this case, those enivronments are cross-section dwellings shaped like everything from a dinosaur to Honest Abe.

You can see (and purchase) all the pieces over at Gallery Nucleus.

Be sure also not to miss the interview with Scott over at Hunt & Gather.

Previously:
Lots of Fun Stuff from Scott Campbell
Scott Campbell Blogs!

UPDATE:
Wow, check out these friggin’ sweet puppets designed by Russ Walko based on Scott’s designs (photos by Love Ablan):

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Here are some sketches I've done for a piece for a gallery show in Paris in the new year. The theme of the show is female puppets. It sounds like a lot of fun to do and I'm already enjoying working on it and I just found out about it yesterday. I'll update about this later.
I'm getting a bit flustered about publishing at the moment. I've been offered a book and it's not the kind of thing I'd enjoy or put on my shelf but I'd like good relationship with this publisher and it could potentially lead to some of my own books. It's really hard to make these kinds of decisions.

You can find out more about the show here.

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Once upon a time, the descriptive line of my blog read, "Songs, stories and puppet shows." I haven't done a puppet show in a long time. However, I am posting a 4:46 minute video of my 5 1/2 year old daughter's marionette puppet show she presented Sunday morning. It may be of interest only to close family members and early childhood educators (especially Waldorf-trained teachers) but who knows--

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I just love puppets.

From the Lion Brand Yarn newsletter:

Hold Your Own Debate With Presidential Finger Puppets

These are serious times and we have a serious choice to make, but that doesn't mean we can't have a little fun! Who do yarn lovers choose for president? Tell us who your presidential pick is and we'll publish the results! Click here to vote!

Free Pattern: Crochet Barack Obama Free Pattern: Crochet John McCain

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and interview at seven impossible things before breakfasts.

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I had mentioned to my friend Jacky back in July that I had no idea what I was going to do for my school visits. Other writers I know play instruments and sing to their young audiences. I play a mean grits box, but that's about where my musical talent ends. Jacky, however, didn't hesitate and said, "PUPPETS!" 

Now Jacky and I have worked on some big projects over the years. When I was the community relations director of the elementary school in which Jacky taught art, we installed gigantic murals in the gym that told the history of the school district. We also coordinated a huge art show each year with our four schools and four more private schools. Jacky and I had to "invent" the display boards we used each year because we didn't have money for real display boards.

So when Jacky said PUPPETS! she probably didn't realize that something so small could be so hard to do. First I explored buying the puppets. I searched every online catalog and retail store in sight. Either the puppets were the wrong size, had the wrong hair, were mouth puppets (much harder to do than hand puppets) or were not in enough different skin tones, plus none of them had the right clothes on! I realized even if I purchased puppets, I would be making clothes for them to resemble the attire in the book.

Next I embarked on a journey to find a good puppet pattern and searched the Internet. I found several, but none of them had the size or detail I wanted for my characters. I tried making my own with miserable results. My husband said the first one looked like a voodoo doll. Boo hoo. (He was right, actually.)

The quest became immensely easier when I discovered Kwik Sew pattern 3322 (available online or at Hancock Fabrics--not JoAnne). I have spent the last six weeks transforming the characters from my picture book to hand puppets and having a lot of fun. I still have to get or make a puppet theater but that should be a piece of cake compared to making ten puppets! I have two puppets left to make but I should be able to finish next week.

Drum roll please. . .Presenting Shante' Keys and Friends!

  

This was an incredible experience. My appreciation of Marion's detail and personality bestowed upon the characters grew. Now I can only hope (and practice like crazy) to be a worthy puppeteer. Shante' and the gang deserve only the best!

 

 

 

 

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Little Grandson (LG)is out of school for a week or so before beginning the free summer school provided by the state for pre-kindergarteners next week, so we had the opportunity to have him for the day while his mom was at class.


This morning I golfed, but he had fun helping Papa wash the car, or more likely spraying him... and after LG helped me make lunch we had a variety of 'projects' to complete. Started by making puppets out of paint stirrers and plastic bags...which of course generated several puppet shows. AND we even wrote a script...he wrote his lines (definitely does not need pre-k, but he likes school) and I wrote mine.(Maybe he'll be a writer someday, too!) Then we put together the kite he got for his fifth birthday a couple of weeks ago, took it to the field down the road and flew it, and then went 'exploring' in the woods at the other side of the field. When we got home, he read me a story and then I read to him...a very good day. We get him again on Thursday, too.


I continue to work on marketing...thanks, Kate, for your suggestions. Also am working on a 'Meet the Author' kit for schools, and on editing the press release my publisher sent me. Found a site yesterday that has all the newspapers in the country listed, so I'll have plenty to choose from when mailing the release out...http://www.50states.com/news/ . Now all I have to do is to sit down and DO all this stuff... Read the rest of this post

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