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Student Introductions and Image Gallery

Tom StewartTom Stewart ✭✭✭
in Hand Puppet Design and Fabrication with BJ Guyer
Please introduce yourself to the rest of the class and feel free to post some of your work.

Comments

  • Tom StewartTom Stewart ✭✭✭
    I'm Tom and have been building puppets for a while :-) Hope to see some old friends and make new ones. My website has some of my builds. www.thecreatureworks.ca 

    I also write a Puppet News blog called www.puppeteersunite.com

    I am taking this course in hopes to find some new techniques and tools to use in my building projects. Some of the things I hope to see are new ways to make arms and attach arms to bodies, different ways of building arm rods and any other fabrication techniques.

    If you notice a lot of my builds have been pretty simple designs. I want to start challenging myself in doing characters that showcase my talent more.

    Can't wait for the webinar and hope to see you there! 
  • Pam GroomPam Groom ✭
    I'm Pam Groom. I like muffins. This foam one is low-cal, but like most low-cal items, it tastes quite bad. BJ, did you dye your foam muffin puppet or is that naturally aged yellow foam with a little brown shading? Do you have do use a very firm foam to shape it using sanding? My green muffin did not respond much to the belt sander.
  • Pam GroomPam Groom ✭
    Oh, my website is www.pamthepuppetlady.com. My most recent work is for a local live entertainer, Kevin Kammaraad, who enters Art Prize every year as a live performer. I landed in the local newspaper a few months back because of my work for him. http://www.mlive.com/living/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2014/03/grand_rapids_puppet_maker_crea.html I also just did some work assisting Pasha Romanowski on his recent Moe Show job. So fun!! Jeremy is still filming using the newest characters, so those characters are hush hush still. They are so cool. Pasha designed them all, so I'm eager to see them in action on film. I recently attended Beyond the Sock 2014 in Denton, Texas. It was the highlight of my year. We made penguins! Pasha designed the pattern and led the building class. Peter Linz and Noel McNeal did the puppeteer teaching half. What wonderful folks! The students are fun too. The five day live workshop felt like summer camp for puppet enthusiasts- deliciously fun.
  • Pam GroomPam Groom ✭
    Nope, I didn't get the pattern yet. I was eager to play along with BJ while he taught so I used the measurements he mentioned in class and used Pasha's Forma series hand for my hand pattern.
  • Troy PicouTroy Picou ✭✭✭
    Hi Pam in the link you have in you post it says your in grand rapids? I live in Grand Rapid MI, would you happen to live in the same city?
  • Pam GroomPam Groom ✭
    Yes, I'm in Grand Rapids, MI. How weird that we never connected before. I'd be interested to hear what kind of puppet building you do. There is one other guy who makes puppets in GR. He is a Spanish prof. at GRCC I believe. He has his students write plays in Spanish and perform them with puppets.
  • Pam GroomPam Groom ✭
    I'm on a foam food kick. My muffin is now a german chocolate birthday cupcake with white icing and has a strawberry cupcake friend. A tomato and grapefruit are drying as well. Once dry, I can test my rod mech to see if it works and put rods on all of them.
  • Tom StewartTom Stewart ✭✭✭
    Awesome work Pam (as always) LOL Love the dissection of the cupcake LOL I knew you had to build them.

  • Pam GroomPam Groom ✭
    Thanks Tom. I made rod controls for three of them, and am going to try a few other rod control designs.
  • Pam GroomPam Groom ✭
    After hearing BJ describe the mech for his muffin, I made this clear prototype so you can see it's guts. The prototype works nicely. It took lots of tweeking to find the right combo of parts (including the spring) and the proper distances between parts. At neutral, the mouth is closed. Pull the string and the mouth opens. The spring back to neutral is nice and crisp. That blue flexible stem that the spring rides on is attached at the base to the lower moving mouth plate, but the upper portion of the blue stem can slide through a slot in the upper head plate when the string is pulled which compresses the spring to create the return action which closes the mouth.
  • Pam GroomPam Groom ✭
    Here is a video link that may explain the prototype better than the pictures. http://youtu.be/1K-jEtT_nAI
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