Coraline’s arms

I started making Coraline’s body. I’m going to walk you through the process to make an arm; the rest of the body follows pretty similar principals. To start with, I take the initial scale drawing that I did of Coraline and turn it into a technical drawing. Which is to say that I decide where the joints will be, how she will be jointed and things like that.

Coraline Scale Drawing

Technical Breakdown

If I were working in a shop, I would get more detailed than this because I would be prepping it to delegate some of the tasks. Since I’m doing the entire build, I’m doing a bit of short hand here. This is a style of body that I build a lot, so the only real differences are in scale. Usually my puppets are around three feet tall, but Coraline is only sixteen inches. That scale difference means that instead of using cardboard reinforced with papier mache for the limbs, I’ll be using watercolor paper.

I did a test with a wood arm from a marionette that happens to be Coraline’s size. If this were a stage production, I would use the wood arm, because the paper will be too light for performance. While I strive to have very light puppets, at a certain point a puppet can become too light and reveal every tremor of the puppeteer’s hand. In fact, I first learned this paper construction from a set of paper marionettes my mentor (Peter Hart, at the Center for Puppetry Arts) used for training. If they were not manipulated exactly right, every error showed.

But, these Coralines are not for performance; they are for display and will be viewed up close. There’s a saying “forty feet on a galloping horse” which means that anything you wouldn’t notice from that vantage won’t show up to the audience. There’s no horse, and Coraline is up close. The wood arm looks so incongruous next to the face that it just won’t fly. She will be made almost entirely out of paper, except for her torso, where I will switch to a reticulated foam.

I made a copy of the drawing and cut out the front and side views of the arm pieces. From these, I created patterns of the pieces of the arms. Normally, I cut slots in the cardboard and fit them together like a paper doll’s stand. Slot A into Tab B and all that. The arms are so tiny that it simply isn’t an option, so instead I’m laminating the cross-members on with an extra tab. That means that each arm has six internal “bones,” instead of the usual four.

Once I had the upper and lower arm assembled, I placed them on my drawing to check for scale. Whew. This is the reason that one does drawings, by the way. Nothing sucks quite as much as making two beautiful body parts and realizing that they aren’t in the same scale.

For the joint, I’m using ribbon. Again, normally I’d be using canvas or nylon strap, but she’s wee. Each joint has ribbon in the front and the back. The goal is to have a clean bend, without restrictions, that doesn’t twist. You know, like an actual elbow.

A flat piece of paper goes at the top of the arm to serve as a stop. I don’t want the arm to hyper-extend, so when the upper arm’s bone strikes the stop, it will stay at a natural angle.

I put the assembled arm back on the drawing to make sure there aren’t any surprises. Woe. The angle of the elbow and stop doesn’t allow the arm to straighten quite enough. This means that I have to adjust the pattern.

Right around here, I did question myself because, as I’ve mentioned before, no one will perform with these. It’s hard though to see something that is not right and leave it.

This photo is just here to give you a sense of scale. See that tiny, tiny piece of paper next to my finger? That’s all I had to trim to make the arm hang right. Working at this size, every millimeter counts. When Bill Schafer approached me originally, he asked for ten inch dolls. I countered with sixteen, because, dang, that would have been hard.

Her skin is also watercolor paper. You’ll note that one side of this piece is torn. That’s because I won’t be able to get inside the puppet to glue the pieces together with a scab as I normally do. By deckling the edge of the paper, I’ll be able to blend it a little. It’s like a single thick piece of papier-mache.

And thick is the operative word. To get it to bend smoothly, I use the bone folder, much the way you might use the edge of scissors to get a curl on a ribbon. If I tried to roll it into a tube without this step, I’d get ugly creases. I could also soften it with water to bend it, but then the glue wouldn’t hold because, well, it would be wet.

I glue the cut edge to the interior of the arm. I’ve switched to hotglue for this.

By the way, not all hot glue is created equal. I use a really beefy hi-strength glue. The clear whitish plastic stuff is garbage. Don’t use it for anything that needs to actually hold.

You see how the paper sort of blends on the arm? I put the seam on the inner arm, because it’s the least likely to show.

And here is the completed arm. Most of the skin won’t show, in fact, the upper arm skin is there just for strength.

I will now repeat this process with her legs.

When I get everything patterned, I’ll trace the patterns onto a sheet of watercolor paper. Then I’ll stack 6 sheets of the watercolor paper together, lightly tack them with glue, and cut all her limbs out in one go with a fine blade on the bandsaw.

I love my bandsaw.

Did you know you can support Mary Robinette on Patreon?