Ping Pong's Puppet Workshop

Our Construction Diary
Page 68

September, 2002

My apologies to those of you who regularly follow our construction progress. It seems that I've gotten a little behind in putting new pages up here for you to see.

What with the last of the renaissance faires of the 2002 season, a doll house for Steve's Mom, a turtle head and a sunflower marionette for the Ojai folks, 26 days in Europe, a pair of 4' x 7' dragon banners, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years, all jammed into the last quarter of the year, there hasn't been much time to record our progress. (In fact, this page is being composed on January 5, 2003).

We've got a bit of catching up to do, so lets get started. Some of the next few pages will show an individual project, while others, like this one, will quickly go over some of the things we did in the last quarter of 2002.

Doors for Agnes Bernauer

St. Wolfgang's Bavarian Guild decided to perform the Pretzel Crossed Lovers story using real people instead of puppets. We were called into action to make some big props for the performances. Here we are working on a set of doors.

Bathtub for Agnes Bernauer

The Pretzel Crossed Lovers is about a bath house owner and his lovely daughter. The story needed a bathtub, so here it is. Both props are made out of 1/2 inch foam core board, cut, painted, and glued as you see. The tub is roughly four feet in diameter.

The Props in Action

Here we see the props in action, with Steve and Candace playing parts in the show.

Working on the head mold of Joseph Smith

Candace Dobson has been inspired to build a puppet of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Leader. She enlisted our aid to help her with some of the steps in building him. Here we see Candace and Steve working on the plaster mold of his head.

Removing the neoprene from the mold

Here we see Candace removing the neoprene head from the plaster mold.

The final results

Ta Da !!! The final result. You can tell he's going to be a fairly large puppet by the size of his head.

The store-bought head of King Tut

We were browsing in our local Egyptian goodies shop, and Steve came across this head of King Tut. He bought it, and decided he loved the sculpt but hated the paint job. So, he repainted it. You can see the results in the panel to the right.

The final paint job

Now this is much closer to the original paint job on the actual bust.

To contact Ping Pong or the Museum Staff Click Here