Once the head is sculpted then I begin on the hands. As with the head, these are usually sculpted, moulded and cast.

To construct an armature for larger hands I will use a heavy gauge aluminium wire. The photo is of a larger hand. Click to change between the Armature and the Hand.

I have wrapped a finer wire around the fingers and thumb, this is to give the clay something to grip so that it doesn't just slide off the wire. The fingers can be bent into position and sculpted individually. The palm and back of the hand can then be sculpted around them.

For a larger puppet I will either sculpt the hands in plastaline or perhaps sculptey. The advantage of sculptey is that it can be heated and hardened in an oven. You can still make adjustments when it is hard, by carving or sanding and it is a lot easier to create a clay wall around the hand for moulding than when you use something which remains soft such as plastaline.

If I am making hands for a very small puppet, then I will probably not bother with a mould, and instead just make a one off. This will involve an armature similar to the one above, but much smaller, made out of steel wire. In place of the wooden support in the photo, I use a small piece of leather for the wrist joint, attached securely to the wire in the palm of the hand. The armature is attached to a length of piano wire, projecting from the side of the wrist, which will ultimately have a small wooden handle for operating. For the smaller hands I will often use milliput to sculpt in, as with the larger hands, I start with the fingers and thumb, allowing them to harden individually and then add the palm and back of the hand.

Hand Mould

The moulds for the hands can be quite complicated, depending on the position they are sculpted in. If the hand is in a relatively open position, and the fingers are not too bent, then you can create a simple two part mould. However as soon as you start to have the fingers bent towards the palm, then you may need to consider a three part mould, in order to be able to brush resin into the mould at a later stage, and release the cast sections from the mould.

A simple hand mould

Click for larger image

A mould for the hands follows a similar process to the head mould. I will usually rest the hand in a bed of clay built halfway up the side of the hand and in line with the wooden support projecting from the wrist. When the hand is later cast, the wood will be replaced with cotton or nylon webbing which acts as a wrist joint. The exposed side of the hand is covered with silicone rubber and when that is cured, encased in a resin and fibreglass shell. The clay wall is then removed and silicone is brushed over the other side of the hand. This too is covered with the resin and fibreglass. It is important to use a release agent between the two halves of the mould. Before applying silicone for the second part of the mould, I spray a wax based release agent on the exposed edges of the existing mould. When the silicone has cured I apply some vasaline to the rim of the resin shell, before brushing on resin and fibreglass for the final part of the mould.

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