Making Another Robot Puppet

Greetings!

I’ve completed my 4th robot sculpture, which is another robot puppet! If you haven’t checked out my blogs about building robot sculptures, you can check them out here: Robot Blogs.

This robot I made to personify nostalgia. As I’m designing and making these robots, I’m starting to get a sense of who they are and what parts of myself and the world they represent. This will come to life even more as I write poems in their voice and make videos with them reciting the poems in robot voices as I did with my first puppet.

I’m really happy with this robot’s design. I used a very small clip for the mouth in order to design him much smaller than my first puppet.

Here’s a quick test video I put together for him:

Here are pics of the making-of process:

This puppet robot is made of Super Sculpey Polymer Clay, wire, nuts, and chain. Since I built him small and thin, I didn’t need to bulk him up with foil first like my other robots.

Also, I painted him black before I painted on the metallic colors. This is a tip from Ace of Clay on Youtube, who is an amazing resource of sculpting knowledge. Metalic paints show the color underneath them, just slightly, and when you use black it actually gives them a wider range of color-change as they move in the light. It also seems to make them look older and more realistic. I’m really glad I learned this from Ace of Clay, it really changes the game for me.

Here are some pics of the finished robot puppet:

I hope you found my process interesting and/or inspiring! I’m really happy with the progress I’ve been making with this new art form. And be sure to sign up for my newsletter to learn about new blog posts!

—Andy