Puppets And Stuff - A Community On The Web For Puppeteers

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Puppets and Stuff... A Community On The Web For Puppeteers!

Welcome fellow puppeteers! For over five years now we have been serving up puppet related content for puppet lovers, makers and enthusiast. The design of the site has undergone many transformations but the initial intent of the site has always been to serve up puppet related information. Many of the users here at Puppets and Stuff have their own sites, blogs or forums and we love to hear about them. There are many here that are puppet makers and you can find puppets for sale either on their own sites or on e-bay auctions they hold.

The heart of the puppet community here is the Forum where you can find tons of information from the history of puppetry to how to market your own puppet company. We discuss just about everything that is related to puppets and puppet theater. You can see the last five topics that where posted in the left hand column. You might be able to tell by the listing that puppetry often involves other abilities other then just how to build or manipulate a puppet. You can find areas to talk about staging, sound, lighting and even other forms of childrens entertainment like story telling, clowning or magic. We feel it is all relative and can enhance your puppeteering skills. There are even members here that are not exclusively puppeteers but deal in such connected art forms as doll making, animation, movie making and other crafts that seem to fit right in. That in part is "Stuff" part of the site.

Not every puppet maker or puppeteer can afford their own web site and we also try to provide ways they can get the word out about what they have to offer. There is a calendar where puppeteers can post upcoming shows, workshops or other puppet events. We also encourage users to post information on the calendar when they learn of puppetry festivals and events that they may be planning to attend.

John Tartaglia's Imaginocean!!

Hi Friends!

I didn't see any discussion here or on PuppetHub of a very new & exciting Puppet Musical, so I thought I'd start a topic.

John Tartaglia (Original Princeton/Rod in Avenue Q; and created Johnny & The Sprites) is opening his newest blacklight puppet musical "Imaginocean" Off-Broadway at New World Stages.

Previews begin March 17, with an official opening March 31.

Check out the show's official website at www.imaginoceanthemusical.com!

Puppet Gallery and Puppet Projects!

We really like pictures here and there are many ways you can share images of your puppets with others. The forum allows you to insert images from your web site or photo services. If you don't have a web site or do not use a photo service you can upload and attach photos to a post! We have tried to make it easy to share content on other sites and the posting screen has options for inserting your puppet videos from sites like YouTube, announce e-bay auctions or feature a book on Amazon.

One very exciting area of the forum is for folks to post about Puppet Projects they are working on. Users will often start of with the announcement that they are creating a new puppet or puppet show and then proceed to lead everyone through the process. Below is an example of what you might see in that area!

Gryphon Marionette

OK, I'm sick of fixing old stuff. I want to try something new and complicated. I've decided that I'm going to try to build a gryphon, or griffin, or however you want to spell it. I've downloaded some pictures of the mythical creature, as well as of lions and eagles. I found some good stuff on the structure and working of bird wings, and I expect that I'll be consulting a great book I have that's all pictures of animal skeletons. My drawing board is a book, and the design work I did in it looks like this:

There are a couple of other ideas mixed in there, but you get the idea. You can see that I've decided to make the bird part of the creature less eagle-y and more like a nile bird of some kind; I'm making the beak move, so it has to be bigger to show off the trick.
I've been building in fits and starts for the last two days. Here is a picture of the separate pieces from a little earlier:

The head is that egg-shaped piece of carved foam-rubber. Ever wondered how something that was half-bird and half-mammal reproduced? Turns out they come from eggs! Here are the two pieces of the jaw on their own:

The black spots are sculpey. I drilled half-inch holes in that part of the wood and dropped in some ball bearings that I had lying around. Then I mashed in the sculpey to hold everything in place. The slightly larger lump has a couple of metal washers worked in as well. The jaw is counter-balanced so that the string will open it when pulled, which is, I think, more intuitively comfortable for the puppeteer then a string that closes the mouth. The eye-ring is where the mouth string will attach, and it is in a place where I can reach it to restring when necessary.
Here's later on in the night, when everything is coming together:

Everything is glued together here, and I've built up the foam rubber considerably. Unfortunately, I forgot to add the wood and eye-rings where the main head strings will go, so I have to cut the stupid thing open tomorrow! Luckily I've decided to cover the head with chopped up wool, so all of the many seams and imperfections will be hidden.
That's all for now, but I'll try to keep posting over the next few/many weeks as this thing comes together. wave

Purpose And Mission

Puppets and Stuff is based out of Kansas City Missouri and is the brain child of Shawn Sorrell. It is not intended as a replacement of other puppetry web sites but as an enhancement of established puppet related sites. It is our hope that Puppets and Stuff will help puppeteers and enthusiast to establish a presence on the Internet. It is an endeavor to promote puppetry to the general public and to strengthen the puppet community.