Armature finished... well, sort of...

OK, so the armature is pretty much done.

'Pretty much' in the sense that creating the character's head is going to be quite involved and I've not started on that yet - technical challenges there will be getting the eyes and eyelids moveable so the character can look around and blink and replacement mouths for speech and expressions.

For the mouths, I'm thinking at the moment to create a series of replacement mouth/face parts that I can attach magnetically. If I can create a subtly 'segmented' look to the face, this will avoid the join being an issue. Back to the doodle-board to get something that works on that front...

and the eyes? I previously mentioned glasseyes.com and have decided to go with some of these eyes in blue-grey, slightly larger than the prototype (18mm this time round) to add to the wide-eyed cutesy factor, which I hope will juxtapose nicely with the quite literal and (hopefully) convincing cockroach build and finish whilst appearing life-like.

I've found some hollow plastic balls that are 19mm, which hopefully will work well for the eyelids. I've also ordered with some foam rubber strips (to be cut to length/width) and round lengths of foam rubber (to be quartered lenthways), which I plan to use to make soft-edged 'segments' for the body on top of some lighter upholstery foam (the latter will bulk out the basic shape). I'm also planning to use the round sections over the limbs to bulk them out and hoping they will bulge nicely over the joints. If they're glued onto the rods but not at the joints, they should also allow access to tweak the tension of the joints, too.

This will all be covered with cast, coloured latex pieces for the 'skin', finished by making and airbrushing on some thinned-down pax paint. This painting approach worked well for the prototype, and using latex colourant to provide a base colour should help the process. There's a brief explanation of pax paint here.

One of the other details I want to add to the limbs is spikey hairs. I've got a pretty simple plan for this - I'm going to try to use false eyelashes, with the lashes laid along the 'hairy' limb parts and teased into spikes with adhesive. With any luck, it'll be cheap and effective and add a nice touch of detail to the finished puppet.

Here's the armature. I've included shoulder/back pieces to attach wings - another detail that will provide the option of some some twitchy body language I think will work nicely accompanied by a chitinous rustling. I've also added a fixed joint between the two limb sections to maintain some spinal freedom of movement. The neck and abdomen sections haven't been fixed in case they need adjusting (in insect anatomy-speak, the thorax is the top/front section of the body and the abdomen is the bottom/rear section):

Next: keying and lighting tests...