CASE STUDY: DRAG PUPPETS

Summary

For this project I proposed to create two separate puppets that live within the same world, one to be made fully of felt and the other of fur. The twist to these puppets is that they would have drag character alter egos and be able to dress themselves in drag and then completely untuck afterwards.

(for the original project proposal check out my previous blog post!)

Process

This process began with a lot of intense research. The inspiration came from RuPaul's Drag Race, where Drag Queens compete to become America's next top Drag Queen. A main part of each episode is the workroom scenes where all the Queen's create and craft their looks with found objects, fabric and mostly glue guns. These scenes reminded me of a more fun and catty version of our school workshop and the link to puppets was easy to make; I love envisioning a world of puppets with no real people involved; a full fleece world. The colour and the campiness of Drag Queens can be so well adapted into the world of puppets.

I did a lot of research into tucking, padding and contouring; basically anything that is done to the male form to transform into the female form. Because Drag Queens are so diverse and all have their own interpretation of their drag, I wanted to create two puppets that would exist in the same world, but have very different styles. I choose to create one in fur and one in fleece because I wanted them to both be animal puppets that, in their regular puppet form, look really classic and then it’s really unexpected when they drag themselves up. I also wanted to address the different personalties that are found in this community, so I have Frank Lynne: a turtle made of fleece, who represents a bit of the more experimental art scene and a more mature queen. And then Squirrel Nutkin: a squirrel made of faux fur, who is a younger queen, a little more innocent and naive, with a huskier body type.

Though the drag aspect was the jumping off point and the driving force behind this project; those parts are the final touches of what is essentially just two puppets. So one of the hardest things about this project so far for me has been to focus on creating the puppets, because I am am just so excited to make their drag costumes!!

Patterning the puppets was the first thing to be tackled after the conceptualization and possibly the one I was most nervous of. I knew that taking on patterning my own puppets would be a big job, but the initial foam pattern is so important to the entire project, provided the form that everything else will be based off of that I definitely felt the heat.

I choose to pattern it by adapting a technique we used to pattern horns in class by making a smaller version, patterning it and then blowing up those patterns to the desired size. The patterning method worked really well, however I was surprised to see how much detail you loose when you work with foam. I have obviously worked with it in the past, but never with my own patterns and so I had added in a lot of details to the original versions, before I sized them up, and had added a lot of intricate darts and sublet curves that became lost when I started shaping it with foam, because I didn’t take into consideration the thickness of the reticulated foam.

Challenges

This was a challenge because it required a lot of finicky re patterning. I think that if you had more time and the materials, ideally the patterning stage would require another step where you make adjustments to your full sized put together foam and then melt the glue, take all the pieces apart and then re draw and re cut them on new foam to keep everything super clean. However, I did not have time nor the extra materials to do so, so I had to just adjust my foam and leave it at that.

In general, the foam stages were the most challenging and because I was trying to follow the methods we learned in school, I was over thinking too much when it came to patterning; making the foam too complicated, when it should really be very simplistic because when you move on to patterning the fabric, that will be even more difficult to do on a complex shape.

Outcome

Next time, I would allot more time for patterning. I would love to be able to the re patterning technique that I spoke about above, but that is really more of a material issue, and to keep costs down on a project, buying double the amount of foam that you require is not the best idea.