Monkey Puppet #1 for Chimp TV

Well I have decided to go against my traditional stance on not posting anything about my projects until they are completed...at least with this specific project. I had written about Chimp TV in an earlier post and I have decided to include people in the actual process of getting this project off the ground. It has taken some time but I feel that this is the push I need to get more done.

Anyways here is an update.

I have been building a couple of monkey puppets for the opening sequence and as background characters for this project. Here is one of the puppets with a rough outline for the pattern that I will use to create him. The arms have been sewn together using a sewing machine, I made the arms longer than normal because he is...well...a monkey.


Here is the first one that I have worked on. You can see he is just at the beginning stages of construction. I find that pinning pieces to the foam skeleton helps with construction. As you can see the arms, body and the back of the head have all been assembled.



Here is the puppets with some more progress done. Hands and arms are ready to be sewn. I use a combination of hand and machine sewing. When attaching the hands to the arms and the arms to the body, I opted to use hand stitching.

It looks grim I know, but here is the puppet with eyes added and head off so I could work on it better.





And here he is with everything assembled. I thought that I would put less effort into his construction because he was a background puppet, but I realized that I just can't do that. Any puppet I build is a reflection of me, so I put everything in to it. It's amazing the things I learn about myself as a builder.


The truth is that I want the puppets for this show to be the best ones I have ever built. They are the lightest and the best fitting ones to date. Plus, I really like the look of these puppets, which is an added bonus. I hope you like them as well.