Free puppet patterns: why are there so many characters missing?
There are lists of free patterns to the right (use the category selector/menu to browse). But there aren’t a lot of free puppet patterns on the net; this article explains why.
Yet another one of my pet peeves about people searching for free stuff. (I have nothing against people wanting to use free patterns: I have yet another myth to break that’s all)
The biggest thing about web searches lately seems to be people searching for particular characters, like "king puppet", "lion puppet", "girl puppet", etc. (A full list of search terms will be added to the bottom of this article for future reference, and updated with more terms as I find them) It’s great to see that people have particular characters in mind, but I imagine people get particularly frustrated searching through all of google just to find the right kind of pattern or character.
Like with the myths of free puppet patterns, this is yet another thing that the general public just don’t think about: the puppetry community simply CAN NOT provide a free - or purchasable - pattern for every single character in existence. This is for two reasons: practicality and money.
A: if you have a look at the right hand menu of this website, you will see categories for types of puppets. There are in fact, more puppet types than are listed here (thanks to differences in cultures and geographic location of puppetry groups. For example, glove puppets differ in style, use and design in Asia compared to say, the UK). Even if we round up the number of puppet types to 20, there are subsets due to cultural issues. So let’s pretend there are about 100 different types of puppet. That’s 100 patterns. Easy right?
B: Ok, now imagine you have a "Noah’s Ark" of character designs. Two of every kind of animal (male and female versions). Anyone know how many animals (let’s include humans, animals, fish, birds and insects as part of that count) there are in existence? Heck, let’s add on extinct animals too, like dinosaurs, a popular puppet character… Well, beetles alone count for several hundred thousand animals (350 000 species of beetles!)… So let’s round this up to a couple of billion animals in existence in the world. 3 billion sounds good to me. But there’s 100 different puppet types, so we must make 100 versions of each animal (eg. a dog marionette, a dog glove puppet, a dog finger puppet…etc). Here, we start doing some fun maths, and must multiply 100 puppet types X 3 billion animals.
C: But there’s also different ages. What if you want a young girl, versus having an older man? Well, now we’re into a whole ‘nother thing, because just how do we account for each stage of life? Let’s pretend that there are three ages (baby, middle aged and senior) to make it easy. So now we have to do more maths: 100 puppet types X 3 billion animals X 3 ages.
D: And here we get to the fun part… Fantasy. Any character you can come up with: monsters; humanoids, like mermaids; aliens… let’s not forget natural objects in the world which can ‘come to life’, like teeth, vegetables, the sun, books… I don’t even want to think of a number that would encapsulate the true amount of characters that the human mind can create. Oh, let’s call that an even billion. And the total number of characters still goes up exponentially: 100 puppet types X 3 billion animals X 3 ages X 1 billion fantasy characters.
E: Yep, there’s still more to be added to the list. Because now we get into materials and tools. See, it’s also a myth that there’s one ‘method’ for each type of puppet. There isn’t. Muppet-type puppets can be built with various methods, and there’s at least three or four methods of building the mouth alone. So let’s say that each puppet type has 10 different methods/materials of building. Add that onto the calculation: 100 puppet types X 3 billion animals X 3 ages X 1 billion fantasy characters X 10 methods.
F: Still with me so far? Now we add in ’style’. Each puppet designer will have a different style, much like different painters have their own particular genre they like, or how music can be separated into rock, soft rock, Christan rock (notice how they’re all ‘rock’, but even one genre has subsets). This is why you can give the same pattern/guitar/canvas to two different people and they will come up with two completely different designs/songs/paintings. And now we have to add on the number of people in the world. We’re well on our way to 7 billion people in the world. 100 puppet types X 3 billion animals X 3 ages X 1 billion fantasy characters X 10 methods X 7 billion imaginations.
(EDIT: Oops… missed something. ‘G’ would be adding into the calculation emotion. That is, there is anger, happiness, sadness, etc. I can’t be bothered redoing the calculations, so just add a few more zeros to the number below)
… We take all those numbers, and we get: 63 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. That’s also known as 63 nonillion (quintillion to non-Americans; here is a conversion table) or 6330. Just in case you were wondering, a trillion has 12 zeros in it; a nonillion has 30! 
That’s a lot of different characters. Remember, these are conservative estimates! There’s probably more characters than that…
So suddenly, finding a "king puppet" doesn’t sound so easy does it? King puppet can mean anything, from a marionette, to an old glove puppet, to a young blacklight puppet… And you’ll forgive the puppetry community if we can’t exactly meet your needs in terms of offering a pattern. Obviously, this also accounts for why there are so few free puppet patterns. You really think that the puppetry community is going to give away that many patterns for free? Cause now you’d have to add labour and cost of materials (and whatever method they’re using to host the pattern, like a website) into account (hence the two reasons: practicaility and money)! Oh, and naturally, you’re also going to have to add in (or rather remove) character designs that are copyrighted (read here, here, here and here), into the equation, because puppeteers are also not going to give those away, whether it’s for free or for profit. This is exactly why you can’t find lots of patterns for specific character designs. It’s just ludicrous to expect 63 nonillion+ character designs to be made available to you, whether for free or not.
So what can you do if you want a particular character?
Well, for a start, you can pick up a book, go to a class, or find some online tutorials to learn the basics of puppet design and puppet characters. Understanding how everyone else does it will help you to figure it out for yourself, or at least understand the basic principles.
Secondly, you can find a free or purchasable pattern, and modify either the pattern (check the copyright info first) or the character (ie. turn a dog into a wolf, or a girl into a boy) to get what you want. This may make some of the work easier, but patterns may not be as flexible as you’d think, so just make sure you clarify each change on paper before you do it.
Thirdly, ask around the puppetry community, like at Puppets and Stuff. There are any number of puppet makers and designers who are silently working on patterns, and if you ask if anyone has something that meets your needs, you may get a pattern before it’s normally released to the public (I myself do this occasionally, so that I can have the pattern tested and work out kinks before officially offering it for sale; no I’m not currently offering any 
). Not only that, but many of them might like the challenge of trying something new, and will offer to make a pattern specifically for your needs: they might not necessarily offer it for free, but from what I’ve seen many of them will just for the chance to stretch their skills a bit - obviously, it helps to ask nicely. The person may also decide to make the pattern available for others to use (again, not necessarily for free), which means that others get the benefit of the pattern too; you may just be able to instigate an opportunity whereby you fill a niche/need in the general public’s puppetry building interests.
Not only that, but asking around is the best way forward. If you don’t know how to make a particular character, there are plenty of puppet makers online who actually go out of their way to offer advice and suggestions. They can show you how to modify a pattern, or create your own; they can discuss styles and genres, suggest ways to achieve a certain effect (ie. how to make a puppet look young or old); they can share tips that only experienced puppet makers know about. You might not find a pattern that meets your needs, but that doesn’t mean you should give up altogether. The brilliant thing about puppetry is you can make anything you like: that, of course, is also often a scary prospect to a beginner builder who doesn’t know how to create a certain character. Experienced puppet makers however, can encourage you to give it a go. (As a side note: I am often asked how I come up with my designs. When I explain that I make it up as I go along, I’m given incredulous looks. But it’s like that old joke about how a sculptor knows what to remove from a block of stone, and what to leave. It’s called trial and error and learning. There is no better way to learning about making character designs than just diving in, and no reason to say that you can’t make a prototype or many versions of the same character until you find the best method or look)
Search terms
Human hand puppet, girl sock puppet, human puppet shadow character, chinese glove puppet, dog hand puppet, glove puppet fish, sock puppet king, duck hand puppet, zebra sock puppet, emu puppet pattern, chinese shadow puppet, pig puppets, sheep shadow puppet, elephant sock puppet, snake, frog sock puppet, people puppet patterns, donkey, wombat, bird marionette, fish finger puppet pattern, wild animal puppets patterns, crow puppet, winged puppet pattern, swan, witch puppet, how to make a marionette cow puppet, squirrel, santa, clown
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