[Laurence Finston]

I used my hole punches to make holes in the two layers of the paper puppet for each joint and also to make the paper disks that I sewed to the front and back. I bought some small buttons and tried using one. It worked and I think this would be good for some things, but not for this puppet. I used a piece of watercolor paper from a border I cut off of the paper in the following five photos. I never throw away scraps of watercolor paper. If I can't use them for painting, I can make very fine papier-mâché with it.

I think the idea of making jointed paper puppets has a lot of potential. I'd like to try mounting them on a sheet of heavy paper along with a pulley system made of paper and make the parts moveable by pulling on thread or light string. There are lots of other techniques used for pop-up books, too.
I bought some punched watercolor paper with holes for an Acme pegbar. Paper formats are a problem that I've been having to deal with. Neither animation paper nor watercolor is generally available in DIN formats, so I've having to do a lot of measuring and cutting or tearing to get the paper down to A4.

The steel ruler in 7th and 8th photos is an essential tool for folding the paper in order to tear it. I have two, this one is 40cm and the other must be 60 or 70cm. I'd like one that's 20cm or 30cm, but the company that made them doesn't seem to exist anymore and I couldn't find anything comparable, even at the fancy tool store I buy things from online sometimes. The weight makes it particularly suitable for this purpose, but a lighter one would also work; it would just slip more easily.

The next photo is a drawing for "The Nutcracker". The original is slightly larger, I had to shrink to 9/10 of the original size in order to fit it into the 16:9 frame on a sheet of DIN A3 paper. The snowflakes were intended to look like paper dolls, so they would be suitable for making jointed paper puppets. I used a Polychromos colored pencil for the background. I think it would be nice to replace it with a watercolor background and film it as though the camera were tracking the snowflakes as they fall. That is, I'd use a pan over the background.

The last two photos are of backgrounds I'd done on A3 paper (or slightly larger) and can't scan at home. I tried out the book scanners at the library where the items to be scanned are photographed from above. This way, I don't have to worry about getting the glass dirty. On the other hand, it's hard to align the items and they aren't pressed flat, as they are in a normal scanner. For panning, A3 will be better because the pattern won't repeat quite as fast. This is something I watch for in old cartoons, for example, when figures are driving along in front of a landscape.