Dale’s Puppet Design (Sans and Frisk)
(Papyrus design here)
FINALLY finished Frisk! holy CRAP that took a while. I wasn’t keeping track, but I would say Sans and Frisk each took at least fifty hours to make. This is largely because I followed absolutely no instructions and made stuff up as it went. Because of the current quarantine, the craft store was closed, so almost all the fabric is stolen from various family members’ clothes from repurposed sources, ie, Frisk’s yellow body was a pillowcase.
Frisk and Sans can be both handpuppets and dolls. If you know Pokemon, think of it like Deoxys. I don’t wanna change Sans right now so I’ll show it with Frisk; they’re basically the same. The puppet has a weird flappy shape (for lack of a more accurate descriptor).
In doll mode, the flap is folded up and wedged inside the body (along with any extra clothes so I don’t lose them). A wire skeleton holds up the head and makes the arms and legs posable.
In hand-puppet mode, the flap is taken out and the wire holding the head is removed to allow for a hand to move it around. Just a little bit of head bobbing can convey a lot of emotion. Puppet mode requires a modified pair of “shorts” that’s really just a tube covering the wrist. So whenever you see a puppet’s head moving in a video, just know that at that moment, they’re not wearing pants.
The heads are made of cosplay modeling foam with magnets embedded just under the surface to allow for changeable facial expressions. I wish I had put a second layer of magnets in Frisk’s head because the plasti-dip was thicker than I expected and the magnetic attachment is not very strong. Sans’ head is just modeling foam, and I learned three things from that experience: 1) Do not try to dry a huge lump of modeling foam all at once. Build it in layers, letting each dry. Also, water is your friend; mix it with some of the foam to make it thinner and fill in cracks etc. 2) Magnets (at least the ones I used) leech a weird brown color into the foam, which you can see if you look closely at Sans’ face. I put down a layer of clear nail polish before putting more foam over it, to prevent further leeching. 3) Watch what you wear while using modeling foam. There are a bunch of tiny pieces of lint stuck on Sans’ head and it took me days to figure out they were coming from my shirt.
Frisk’s boots are made of cosplay modeling foam and painted with acrylic paint. To make the boot shape, I first made 2 casts roughly in the form of Frisk’s feet. This is a really useful technique people use to make cheapo home-made manikins of themselves to size clothes on: basically you cover the shape you are trying to copy with something flexible, like a t-shirt or in this case, tissue paper. Then you wrap the crap out of it with tape (duct tape for big projects). Once you have the object completely covered, make whatever cut you need to to get it off, then stuff it with something and tape the seam closed. Voila! (fun fact: I made a model of my chihuahua’s entire torso this way. He was...less than enthusiastic about the process.) Frisk’s Hair is made of thick brown yarn twisted into what pretty much turned out to be dreadlocks. Pictures here
