I’ve done some research on plasticine models. I’ve looked at the whole process and took some copies from the book. Taking the drawings I had from my character I drew the wire and balsa skeleton. Of course, I had to study all kinds of mechanisms mainly the wings and the fingers/feathers. The wings because they have to close and open and when closed they must fit the body tidy. The fingers because they have to be the most flexible part of the body since they will move a lot but it also needs to be stable. So I developed several wing skeletons and tried them out:
I chose the last one, where the wing as a bigger piece of balsa and I asked Helen, she agreed with me. I mounted these and the sketches on an A1 sheet to show what I’ve looked at and experiment.
By now I feel like I am getting somewhere. I start to visualise how my puppet will look like and I know I will have a lot of small problems with the plasticine. However, I’m looking forward to it.
Making a bird puppet is not easy and it’s surely not easier to animate it. Hopefully, I am done with the puppet this week so I can move on to the animation part.
Note: As I read, I shouldn’t be rushing things and I should be patient because of the better the armature the easier it is to animate it. Most people tend to be impatient and anxious about starting animating. So now I’ll focus on the armature and its quality.