Have you ever seen a pupopet and it looks just like a famous person? Have you wondered how to make one that looks like your favorite celebrity, or your best friend?
A look-Alike Puppet is basically a caricature. We’ve all seen caricature drawings or ourselves and others. Often at festivals there will be an artist drawing cartoon caricatures of guests.
A look-alike puppet is a 3-D caricature. Made from foam and fleece, or paper-mache or latex.
We may want a caricature puppet for a play or skit, but often people want them as a gift for someone.
Here is a short video of a look-alike puppet I made of a pastor friend of mine. The assistant pastor wanted a puppet that looked like the pastor.
I made the puppet, then I wrote a skit that my daughters and myself performed for the church that ended with the puppet being introduced. You will hear the roaring laughter the puppet brings from the congregation.
As you can see, a look-alike puppet can be a lot of fun.
But, how do you make a caricature puppet?
If you are a sculptor, you can make a clay reproduction of your subject and cover it with paper mache, or make a mold and cast it in latex. Use the method HERE for a latex puppet.
In this article, I am going to focus on making a foam and fleece arm-rod puppet, but a lot of the ideas will be applicable if you choose to sculpt your character in clay.
Making an exact reproduction will be for practical purposes, impossible.
What you want to do is determine the basic head shape. Does your friend have a tall slender head, or is it round like a bowling ball? Does he have puffy cheeks? Is his nose wide or slender?
Once you have a basic shape, try to pick out the three or four things that make this person unique. If you were to try to describe him/her, what features stand out?
If you remember Bob Hope, caricatures of him always had a narrow, ski-slope nose. Jimmy Durante was known for his large nose.
To make a caricature puppet of him, you would want a large nose with a bulbous end.
Jimmy Durante’s nose was his most prominent feature and caricatures of him capitalized on this.
Notice in the cartoon, it is the nose that identifies the character.
If you wanted to make a Jimmy Durante puppet, or a character based on him, you would want to emphasize the nose. You would exaggerate it and it is the nose, along with a similar hat and a twinkle in the eyes that would identify him to the audience.
Thinking of presidents, a Donald Trump puppet would need to have just the right hair and an orangish tint to the skin. While Barrack Obama caricatures always have large ears.
So look at your subject – what immediately stands out?
With Dolly Parton, you would want large blonde hair. She is known for her large wigs. Larger, red lips would also help create the picture as well as a puppet body that would bring Dolly’s to mind.
With Pastor Joe, I picked out three things. His long white hair with a ponytail, his glasses, and he always wears a cross necklace, so I included that.
I took a great deal of time making the hair wig from yarn. You can’t tell from the picture, but the yarn has a little silver tinsel in it that helped capture the gray/white color of the pastor’s hair.
I also did an Elvis impersonator puppet. To get the Elvis look, I focused on the hair, again. Long black sideburns and an Elvis costume.
Terry Fator has an Elvis impersonator puppet, but my young daughters say mine looks better. They do say Terry’s Elvis has a better costume though.
Neither of our puppets really look like Elvis, yet because of the hair and clothing, they are immediately recognizable as representing “The King Of Rock-N-Roll.”
I don’t remember where I found it, but this is a caricature of a cat. Notice the eyebrows on the puppet and the real feline.
It is the “McDonald’s arches above the eyes that make this cat distinctive from other cats. Add a few stripes and viola – the puppet represents the cat.
So ask yourself, what makes your subject stand out?
For tutorials on actually building your puppet check out our videos HERE and our other articles. Just click MENU at the top of the page, then click HOW-TO for the list of categories.
