by Richard Coombs » 02 Jul 2018, 12:44
Just the way I prefer to do it Nick.
I don't own any chisels ...I don't like em.
My original method was glueing together plywood slices with different profiles ( a bit like a popular 3-D cardboard sculpture puzzle popular in the 80s and 90s)
This changed to cutting out separate facial features in pine and assembling a face that way.
Currently I make the front of a head ( very much the facial 'mask' ) out of a solid block of Lime.
But as you can see , I cut this face down into its component parts and shape and sand each bit individually before reassembling .
Its slow and fiddly work ..but I don't think its any more so than carving a complex head with chisels .
Obviously a lathe turned head with only basic eye and mouth features chiselled in afterwards and a separate nose pegged on is going to be the simplest and fastest way to work.
But this is not a method that appeals to me or my aversion to chisels .
So for me its Lime for the face , and any wood I have to hand ( Ply or Pine ) for the sides and back of the head.
The side sections have no 'middle' so the head is hollow .
Even the back piece can be drilled and sanded out before glueing on .
So although some of my puppet heads are large , they are actually relatively light.
This is fortunate as the body and costume work on my figures is often weighty ... if my heads were heavy also then the puppets would be too heavy to use properly.
But this is not the case.
Whichever stage of my woodwork evolution I have been at , the necks of my figures have always been made separately from the head.
PVA glue is so strong , I have never knocked a head off a neck - yet- !
Other bits of the head making have changed over the years , but the necks have always remained as plywood slices with the oval finger hole removed first then glued together to form a tower .
I use two fingers in the neck of the puppet , so the only way to make the finger hole in a solid block of wood would require two holes auguring out next to each other , then cleaning up the bits in-between with a long chisel.
And like I said ..I don't do chisels.
The whole method seems to be constantly developing - a kind of 'work in progress' .
Although I do feel in the last few years since discovering how nice Lime is to work with , that I have pretty much settled on a method I enjoy and that is right for me.
Of course Lime is dearer than Ply or Pine , so not using it for the parts of the head so often covered by hair or hats, means that my little stash of Limewood will eek out to make more heads.
Hope that clears up any questions.
All the Best
Richard
