working the naive angle

I have started in with the object making hoping that my lack of experience and naive confidence will result in stunning masks and puppets. The only puppets I have made in the past, the ones I’ve worked with, have largely been figurative and very straight forward – either because I was directing and not puppeteerig or because the object’s construction was rudimentary. So, as I begin to craft the masks and puppet heads for the Keanu project I’m hoping I’ll benefit from some direct skills transference and my paper mache intuition will kick in.

I am launching my naive attempts at mask making with two strategies in play. I am taking one cue from the model outlined on this fabulous page, which describes how to make this one kind of puppet mask. However, I am stealing this idea at its most basic level and than adapting it for use as various  characters in the play. So although the base here is the same as outlined on this page these masks will take a different form as new layers are added.

My second mask uses a design thunk up this morning by me and my boyfriend. I find that Keanu’s face (I’m making several masks of his face) has a very particular shape and worried I’d lose this shape in the first mask recipe. Instead I thought if I have one dimension (front on) that is perfectly Keanu-esque and another dimension (profile) perfectly Keanu-esque we can drap the paper strips over the armature (now plugged into each other at parallel angles) and the structure will communicate through the “skin.” The structure of his face will be defined by these dimensions and then, with paint and more features later, they will be complimented further to appear more like the actor. I did add cheek bones, a major structural point in the masks both because they give the layers more shape but they give some support to the cardboard creating the profile so as I drape the wet paper the profile doesn’t get pushed over and the face collapse.

I have to say….they look like some pretty abstraction of traditional African masks. They have a very flat appearance and I worry that their weirdness will detract from their purpose in the performance. Nevertheless, I’ll carry on. There are more layers, more facial features, and ultimately a paint job to turn things around. There is only the first layer on but they are truly distinct from the other masks made from the first model.  We’ll see if they make it into the show after all – but I’m just pleased to get the object making underway finally.

Here is a picture of my cat Squirrel giving me a hand.