The heads

Once the body of the puppet was completed it was necessary to decide how to produce the heads. We needed 3 heads as there were 3 puppets, one for each stage of body emptiness (to know more about that, please check out the blog post called ´puppet evolution´)

After multiple trials we decided to make the heads out of cork.

This choice was made because, as a material cork is easily available, it is sturdy and yet easy to work with. We could easily attach it to the body later and it was easy to animate. What we didn’t take into account is that when something is hand-made it is quite difficult to be replicated. However, in the end this was not a big problem as we followed the same rhythm of "emptying" both in the head and body. Thus each head could be slightly different than the other.

The first head (whole head) was more blue / gray and less beige / yellow. The next head was thinner and with more tones of yellow (as it was supposed to ´lose´ thread and reveal the inside). We also added a small dent to add a little bit of wire, so as to make it seem like there was metal inside the threads at some point. The third head had even more yellow and orange threads and a bigger dent on the back where you could see a clearly part of the inside (wires).

We also had to dig up holes where the eyes were supposed to be as we decided to give the puppet ball and socket eyes. Even though all the heads didn´t look the same, we had to be really careful to make sure the position of the eyes was the same in all heads.