Tiny hands !

Once we had started the construction of the puppet we also started the hands. In the beginning the test hands were made with the "bad" wire, as we wanted to keep the good one for the final puppet.

The first wire hands we made were too big for the proportions of our puppet. So we tried out different techniques for the next skeletons. As they are really small, it was hard to work on the details. It was impossible to produce two identical hands, but as we repeated the process a lot of times it got better.

The way how we wrapped the threads around the the wire played a big role in the appearance. one option was to wrap the thread up and down the finger, which made the fingers look too big. The next options where to wrapping the fingers only once and then glue and cut the thread, then use new thread for the next finger. This already looked better, but it was more complicated to do, and still didn't look the way we wanted it. The best option we found was, to "open" the thread a bit, before wrapping it. This way it looked much thinner and we could go up and down the finger, which permited us to use the same thread for the whole hand. We still had to add a bit of glue in order to fix it, which we put carefully during the wrapping.

Once we had found the proportions and "thread-wrapping-technique" we like, we constructed hands with the good wire. We wanted to use the thinnest wire we had (0.56) and wind it double to make it stronger. The new hands looked really good and we fixed them to the arms of our dummy puppet. Everything seemed to work great but: the hand broke. The wire was too thin. especially the wrist joint wasn't strong enough.

The solution: a bigger wire. We constructed another test hand with the bigger wire (1.0) and managed to make it as small and thing as the previous hands. Now that we knew that this was possible, we decided to use the same wire for arms and hands, in order to be directly connected. Not only does is make the wrist more stable, but also it makes the hand more easy to animate.