A first concept for Thor’s head
For the next little while, I’ll be doing periodic posts about creating the puppets for a production of Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants at Stages Theatre in Houston Texas. Most of these posts are actually going to be written for Rob Kimbro, the playwright and director of the show, as well as the rest of the design team but we thought that you might be interested in following along as well.
Because Odd is the son of a woodcarver and a pretty good hand at carving wood himself, my inclination is to use wood for the puppets. At first glance, this didn’t seem feasible because wood is heavy and it is labor-intensive to create. The weight is a serious issue. While it is possible to paint something with very realistic woodgrain, that adds to the labor involved in creating the piece. Because we will probably need multiple versions of some of the figures, I wanted to avoid a style that would be too expensive to make duplicates of.
The approach that I’m suggesting is to use Albrecht Roser’s paper folding technique with wood veneer. This should give us a beautiful woodgrain finish with very, very lightweight figures. The style is also naturally stripped down and spare which I think lends itself to the Nordic landscape of the story.
As a trial, I’ve taken a stab at the bear’s head.
![]() Thor is not cute. |
![]() I’m trying to position the ears laid back against the head to make him a bit more formidable but am not happy with them. I’ll probably wind up fiddling a lot when it’s in three dimensions. |
![]() From here I’m going to move on to concepts for the full figure of the puppet before going back to work on Loki and Odin. |