New Website Up!

You can now visit me at:

www.deborahroseguterbock.com

I will no longer be posting directly to this blog but you can keep up with my current endeavors on the blog portion of my new site.

This site will remain active as a sort of archive, or testament to my past work :)

Draping and Applying a Dragon's Skin

Over the last 2 weeks, I have been working on making and applying a "skin" to my dragon puppet.
It's a lot of 2D to 3D thinking (which is difficult for me) so I have fudged it a bit, but so far so good.
I am utilizing a more dog-like structure as I want the final product to be fuzzy and lovable, as opposed to scaly and scary :)

The next step will be to add additional fibers for texture and continuity in terms of appearance.
Electronics for the doll house have arrived, so we will also be hooking that up to be lit from the inside!

Recent Work

I've been multi-tasking this week. Continuing work on the dragon puppet, making jewelry for birthdays and commencing the structural build for our entry in the Let there Be Light Show this year.
Slowly but surely productive as a pregnant, full-time workin' lady can be, I guess! :)

Dragon Puppet Progress

The understructure of the head is now complete. Now, on to the skin and the body!

Finger Print Tree

So, apparently, being pregnant makes you tired....
I've been falling down on my studio time a bit, but I did manage to whip this up for a friend this week :)
Hopefully I can get the energy up to start working on some more jewelry at home, too.

Dragon Puppet - First Steps

After a week of vacation, I decided to take on a big project: making a large dragon puppet out of a model for a large T-Rex head. One of the perks of having a studio at the McGuffey is getting to work around a bunch of very generous people and I happened to come across this dinosaur model in our free pile.

I decided to use the plastic skull base as the form for my dragon head.

The first major obstacle was engineering a mechanism to allow the head to be "worn" on a puppeteers hand. This required making some large holes, inserting padding and working with elastic to achieve a comfortable fit.

Next step, adding on horns, ears and other anatomy, after which I will get to make the dragony skin!

Marionette - Styling Completed

Completed figure combined the polymer base with experimental use of mohair, paint, fibers, and beads. Whereas the green coat was hand-stitched from a pattern, much of the clothing was glued directly to the figure, as it will be a permanent fixture for long-term use. 

After much consideration and some trail and error, the face and body were finished with the use of acrylic paint in hues of purple and blue. The blue "freckles" work well with the hair to fulfill a sense of other-worldliness or the supernatural. Next time, I might experiment more with the use of translucent clay to heighten this effect.