It's VBS (Vacation Bible School) time again! A few years ago I started creating a custom puppet for my church's VBS every year. This year the theme was not as straight forward as before. In 2019, with the video game theme, I created a retro video game character, Bolt McThunder. In 2021 (R.I.P. 2020) I created Gilbert Firesnout the dragon for the Medieval/Knights theme. This year's theme is a little more nebulous: creativity. It's technically called "Spark Studios" and the theme focuses on "artistry and innovation." Not the easiest theme to create an interesting puppet around! After a few scrapped ideas, I came up with a musical character whose personality would fit in during the Golden Age of cinema: the Maestro.
I wanted the Maestro to mainly consist of shades of 1 color (sort of reminiscent of vintage cartoon color palettes). Blue just turned out to look the best. I also decided to lean in to the vintage feel and give him a "Jughead" type nose. As always, I created a sketch to base the build off of. Since I wanted the Maestro to have a large, full beard, I knew I needed to build that beard shape directly into the head (instead of adding extra foam to build up layers afterwards) in order to keep the head as light as possible. That's why the uncovered foam head looks like a bloated frog! With such a full beard, a flat mustache just did not fit well. So, i carved a 2" thick piece of foam into the desired shape and then covered it with the blue fur. It gives the mustache a nice dimensional look and I've taken to calling it a "Pringles Man" mustache! I also decided to try some new pupils with this build. I usually use all sizes of circular doll eyes for the pupils. However, I felt compelled (as I've said before) to lean into the cartoony aspect of this design and ended up using oblong doll eyes. These pupils ended up adding just an extra "something" to this character. Overall it was a fun, quick-ish build. Nothing too complicated (I'm looking at you, dragon). But I think in it's simplicity a successfully quirky character was created!
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Jesse Moorein this blog you'll get a small glimpse into what goes into the puppets I design and create. If you have any questions, please email me at [email protected]. Enjoy! Archives
May 2024
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