(Reminder: yes you can still shop at Puppets in Melbourne through the next week and over New Years. However, please note because of post office closures, I will not be shipping on Christmas, Boxing Day or New Years Day. Sorry)

In probably the last build for 2008, I’m offering up a new shadow puppet using my new technique

Follow up:

I picked up some translucent patterned paper at Officeworks and was immediately inspired to use it for a shadow puppet. So you have a wonderfully pretty jellyfish shadow puppet! The issues I had in the design were in the tentacles; I overestimated how complicated I could make it. Shadow puppets it seems, prefer the ‘less is more’ design more than with other puppet types. Anyway, this jellyfish is laminated for protection and sturdiness, and has two rods; the tentacles are in four parts. Two moving parts, and then two additional moving tentacles attached to that adding some more moving goodness.

You can see in the video below the technique and puppet; the lighting issues I had was that the big lamp I was using was causing a huge obvious beam and was washing out much of the colour patterns on the paper. I found my old light - originally I’d bought it for shadow puppetry, but forgot where it was - which is a portable striplight fluoro. I’ll be using this light from now on, as it reduces the sharpness of the beam, spreads the light better, is simple to ‘hide’ behind, and amazingly enough, even does a magic trick of disappearing the rods almost completely from view! … I added a bit of blue lighting gel for some added atmosphere. The actual puppet appears much better (clearer) behind the screen in real life… Oh yeah, and the video is actually upside down! ( It just looked prettier upside down)

You can buy the puppet here…. And in case you were wondering, yep, I’m making a whole bunch of puppets next year using this new technique. (By the way… happy holidays! I’ll be posting until Friday, but will probably take some time off next week to chill)

[video:youtube:9XYPrVNDzMI]