It is clear that one of my main mistakes, as I have mentioned repeatedly, was to first build armatures, and sculpt the figures onto these. The bone structure I had created without enough study into form made it impossible to achieve the figures I desired. And because I thought things would be moving much quicker, and I was moving production down to Italy, I hurried to build a second armature for the young girl, a smaller one, again, before leaving and before sculpting.
I do wonder, however, how it would have been had I done things the "right" way. Today I thought to use the young girl's first armature in the place of the armature built for the old lady. This latter one had been made economically, and hence has wire arms. As I now have an extra full ball and socket armature sitting idle, I thought to use that for the old woman. The two armatures are roughly the same size, at least in height. Grandmother has wider hips, but this would not be a problem.
Instead, what of the full armature did not fit in the mould were the arms. She had been sculpted with wire in the place of the bulky elbow joints, and therefore can only work with wire, or with smaller joints, which of course I don't have.
This has inevitably brought me to worry about the fact that in all the puppets there are places where the skin only just covers the joint, and this will surely be very problematic when casting the silicone puppets over their skeletons.
Clearly, therefore, sculpting onto the armatures is the correct way to work, but only after first making quickly sculpted mockup to be sure of the right proportions to build the armature to.
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