The Maker’s Lab 2023-2025 Phase #1 – Ling Jia Le

Our puppet design prompt for this workshop was Grumpy or Cheerful Me. We had to pick either a grumpy or cheerful personality to portray in our puppet’s physical appearance, which was also supposed to resemble us.

I picked Grumpy because I find negative emotions easier to work with and allow more room for creative expression. I started my design concept by thinking about the societal assumptions of the term grumpy. People use it on elderlies a lot, especially old men. The phrase ‘grumpy old man’ is frequently thrown around. At least, this was my experience.

Identifying the gendered and ageist perception towards the use of the word “grumpy”, I decided to subvert these stereotypes and create a puppet that had an unconventional profile for a grumpy person, which in this case is a grumpy young girl.

Preoccupied with conceptualizing the design, I overlooked the self-portrait component of the prompt and went with something that did not look anything like me. I guess this design choice to go for something more subversive is intrinsically me.

I explored a range of ways to facially express grumpiness by playing around with the shape and arc of the eyebrows, as well as the shape of the eyes, and the size of the mouth, changing around the various variables that define a face.

I eventually picked a facial expression with furrowed brows, squinted eyes, veins/nerves popping at the temples of the head, and an arched mouth. I was going for an exaggerated look. I also gave the puppet a pair of ponytails, typical of a young girl. 

For the body of my puppet, I wanted it to resemble an ogre, Shrek-like, because I found it potentially comical with its grumpy expression. So, I gave my puppet an over-the-top hunch back and burly arms whilst having slender legs. 

For the second part of the workshop, our design prompt was to design a dog head that would go on our puppet’s body. This is able to happen because the original puppet head is detachable. 

Scale drawings are pivotal to puppet-making as every step of the construction is anchored by it. This is different from the way I worked because while I have a brief sketch of how I want my sculpture/puppet to look, I often let the making process inspire changes to my design.

From where the holes are supposed to be drilled to how much wood to cut, the benefit of a scale drawing is that all the thinking has been done. The most important purpose of the scale drawing is to clearly communicate your puppet’s design to the director. This however leaves little room for changes. 

A scale drawing that is basically a blueprint for your puppet facilitates a smoother and faster building process. Unfortunately, there were times that I did not enjoy having to follow everything so closely as it became very mathematical and rigid.

As much as I disliked the process of adhering closely to the scale drawing, I understand that the instructors were trying to train us to fabricate with precision. A constant phrase that they brought up was, “Learn the corners before you cut them,” It is crucial that we understand our techniques and materials before trying to re-invent the approaches. After all, in this industry,  we want to accurately recreate what we proposed to our clients and sometimes, it also takes an understanding of the rules, to break them.

Having worked with wood before, it was a rather smooth process when constructing the wooden structure for the torso and leg. I was introduced to a new material, called Leukoplast tape, which creates a strong joint but also provides a surface that contact glue can grip on. 

We added beads at the hip to create spacing between the legs and also to allow the legs to swing back and forth. In the process of inserting the aluminium rod that allows the legs to turn on, I learnt how to bend the metal at a right angle with the vice and how to hammer it into the wood. 

Sponge sculpting turned out less intuitive than I imagined. It was methodical and mathematical. We had to create a pattern for the body form because the body parts had to be hollow, which is crucial to reduce the puppet’s weight. I initially thought we would stack layers of sponge and then shape it with a penknife, but that would make the puppet heavier. 

To create the exact size and shape drawn on the scale drawings, we devised ways to translate the lines and dimensions of the drawing into measurements to be cut out of the sponge pieces. It was tedious and required a different mode of thinking. We had to bring in mathematical formulas to convert form to measurements. My puppet’s limbs required me to incorporate formulas for circles, cylinders, and cones. At that moment, I regretted every muscle definition I gave my puppet.

While it was a painstaking process for a less logical, daydreamer kind of person like me, I understand that the math part of making is inevitable especially when we need to calculate how much material we need for the build to project a materials budget.

Despite having the front and side view drawings, it was at times difficult to visualize a 3D image of my 2D drawings. I also learnt that for sponge sculpting, good penknife cutting skills are required to cut perpendicularly and cleanly.  

Additionally, choosing the right sponge thickness and density is important too. I learnt this painfully. I was working on the thighs and used a dense but thin sponge. The effect was that the sponge would not hold up a nice shape, and instead have ugly indentations. It was indenting at areas that had no internal sponge structure and where the internal structure collapsed as I may have wrapped the exterior sponge too tightly. I used this thin sponge for the structure on the inside and it was too weak and not substantial enough to create the shape of the thigh. Furthermore, using a thin sponge to wrap around the structure also meant that the sponge would respond to areas where there is no structure, which led to the indentations. I also ended up overcomplicating the structure inside when I could have just used a 1-inch thick sponge on the inside and outside to create the thigh shape. 

For most parts of the workshop leading up to sponge sculpting, we were given clear instructions that would achieve what we wanted. This is due to the smaller differences between Shawne (the other apprentice) and my design choices as well as previous steps not requiring so much customization. However, as we started sponge sculpting, we suddenly had to make our own decisions and the need for mathematical formulas came as a surprise. There was guidance from the instructors but a large part of troubleshooting/brainstorming how to achieve our design is self-driven. I believe this is also because there is no hard and fast rule to achieving what we want. 

My initial overreliance on the instructors’ instructions made it difficult for me when we were thrown the ball to think on our own. I needed to be in a self-directed headspace to make my own decisions.

Fortunately, once I changed that mindset of relying on my instructor’s step-by-step instructions, I was able to think more clearly about what to do next. And when I made mistakes like with how the sponge density affects creating the leg’s form, I remember them deeply and gain first-hand knowledge of how the material (sponge) actually works. 

Overall, I think there is no hard and fast rule to achieve our designs and perhaps it is our instructors’ way of pushing us to be more confident in the decisions we make while puppet building. 

Regardless of all the challenges, it was very satisfying to see the end result of a form being very close to what I drew. Having gone through this process, I am confident of tackling it again with more precision.

For both additive and subtractive sculpting, transferring the scale drawing lines to the material was key. This was to recreate what was drawn accurately. To do that, we needed to locate and demarcate the centre of the material, which would then connect with the centre line drawn in the scale drawing and transfer accordingly. For additive sculpting, we worked with the puppet’s head, which began with an oval-shaped styrofoam as its core/armature. To locate the centre of the oval-shaped sphere, we had to find the middle of the vertical and horizontal circumference of half the sphere with a soft measuring tape aka soft measure. I was a little lost at this step because we were going at a pace where all the steps appeared nearly cryptic. I was thrown off when our instructor used the square ruler in one of the steps to find the centre of the oval sphere. I later found out that it is used as an alternative and faster route to find the centre of the oval sphere. Looking back, I felt that I needed to understand the purpose of the steps and listen more rather than focus on writing everything down.

After marking the centre line on the styrofoam, we used it as a point of reference to draw out the eyes and nose of the face. My puppet’s head was smaller than the styrofoam at certain areas like the chin and cheeks so I shaved it down with the penknife, cross checking with the scale drawing constantly. A general rule of thumb was that the styrofoam core of the head has to be roughly half a cm to 1 cm smaller than the actual head and facial features, which is for the addition of the air dry clay. After that, we lightly sanded the sculpted styrofoam and commenced on the fun part of adding and sculpting on the air-dry clay on the styrofoam.

In the case of subtractive sculpting, we could use the grid we drew to transfer all the details onto the styrofoam. Subtractive carving feels unforgiving at times because you are shaving off material but actually you can always glue parts back and reshape it. 

Both additive and subtractive sculpting rely heavily on one’s artistic sensibility to imagine how the scale drawing will look 3-dimensionally and then translate it to how you work with your material – pinching, kneading, and shaping to recreate the form. It does require a trained eye and an experienced hand. It is difficult to recreate something accurately, but honestly, I would say spend 70% trying to follow the drawing and 30% making it look beautiful/symmetrical. 

I liked what the instructors did to teach us papier-mâché. We had to apply three layers of papier-mâché to our air-dried clay puppet head to give it enough strength. For every layer of papier-mâché, a different instructor would supervise us and divulge their approach to the technique. It opened my eyes to how varied a single technique can be and that there can be individuality to craft. It was also about figuring out what works best for you. However, the same principle still applies to their individual methods, which were to avoid wrinkles and capture as much detail of the form.

Preparation work is key for papier-mâché. It is all about the tearing. The different approaches the instructors introduced to us were all about how to prepare the gum tape, which was what we used for Papier-mâché.

While papier-mâching my puppet head, the constant feedback from the instructors was that my paper strips were not torn small enough. I guess for me, it was enough. I was also holding on to previous personal standards of the technique. For my personal projects, I would Papier-mâché with pieces that were not very small by their standards. It was only at the third layer that I fully understood how small I had to go. I had to unlearn my own definitions of what small and big are to realize how small I had to go.

Another new thing I learnt was to sculpt with the Papier-mâché technique. There are several smaller details on my puppet’s face – the veins popping on the temples of my puppet’s head. Small details are often lost in the process of the Papier-mâché layering so, sometimes it is best to do the details on the final layer. My puppet’s bursting veins were done on the final layer. To do that, we used a string underneath to give it the shape of the vein. Instructor Silei also suggested sculpting directly with the softened gum tape.

Our lesson on sourcing for materials was actually a much needed retail therapy amidst an intense, non-stop building workshop. In the age of e-commerce, it had actually been awhile since I went on a shopping trip like this. We went around visiting various shopping spots that specialised in different materials. It was an amazing sight to see many stalls selling the same things cluster together despite knowing that they will be splitting their market share further and putting themselves up to fierce competition. As consumers, we are spoilt for choice and benefit from price competition. Although, many of the stalls probably collude on their prices. After all, their real enemy is e-commerce. 

Coming from a sculpture background, I am so used to having the making process end with the sculpture looking the way I want it to. However, the process doesn’t end there for puppet building. Once you get the puppet to where you want it to look aesthetically, you also have to test the puppet. Testing means performing with the puppet and seeing if it is comfortable to perform with it. 

Due to my puppet being chunkier than normal puppets, it requires more strength to hold up the puppet. This led to the wire rod we inserted at the hips of the internal structure bending. Moreover, the limbs’ thickness also hindered the puppet’s articulation and reach. It was also causing the two feet to rub against each other.

I am always aware of how fast my patience for something runs out, but was never really held accountable for it. It was only during the course of this workshop, under the constant supervision of the instructors, that my impatience was pointed out to me. 

I feel that this impatience in me has always been a mix of many things. Firstly, in the context of this making process, we had limited time and were often in a rush to get things done quickly. Our skills were not on par yet so it would naturally and rightfully take longer. So, I ended up rushing to get it done within the time frame. I guess it also shows that maybe I am willing to sacrifice my standards to get things done on time.

Secondly, I think I do lose my patience when there is a need to redo or work beyond the time frame I am given because I just did not like it when things overran. 

Thirdly, I do lose my patience with the craft. I get to a certain point where I can see the transformation of the material and then stop short of making it really refined and nice. I guess seeing the material transform was satisfactory for me. For example, if the likeness of the styrofoam dog head had been achieved, I would sometimes not bother too much with the details of the face. 

This lack of patience and attention span sometimes led me to cut corners – a decision that would make me feel guilty. So, I ended up seeking the instructors’ validation that making this shortcut was negligible in the making process.