I wanted to do this for a very, very long time: Last year I presented my Myctophyformes Draco to you, a Chinese Lanternfish puppet I made for Shelley Noble's Halfland saga. And I promised a longer version of the making of back then.

Since I have documented the complete process of mold making and puppet casting, I thought it would be nice to write a small e-Book on how I do things. Perhaps the description of my workflow is helpful to at least one of you. Well, it took me about a year but here we go:

Click the image to download the pdf file (1,7 MB).

This small guide isn't perfect, and I'm sure you'll have a few more questions after reading it. But it's not my approach to offer you a perfect guide – this topic is way to complex to describe it properly within 30 pages.

Nevertheless I really hope it may get you started with

• making models for puppet animation
• mold making and
• casting stop-motion puppets from cold foam latex.
  

If you still have questions, please use the comment section or write me an – I'll do what I can to help!

The knowledge I share with you today is based on the knowledge of a number of amazing people I'd like to thank:

All my gratitude (again and again) to Mary Murphy, who taught me most of the things I know about cheap'n'easy puppet making, and I highly recommend her as a teacher! (You could also buy her books!)

Also a lot of thanks to my internet friend Shelley who's giving birth to one creative outburst after another, and who encouraged me to join her Halfland underwater party.

And last, thanks to all of you out there sharing their knowledge on the internet, and especially to the sma.com community! You all are great!

So. – Have fun!

Click the image to download the pdf file (1,7 MB).

Supplemental:

There's a mistake occurring throughout the whole e-book: I talk a lot about cold foam latex, but it's only cold foam, without any latex involved. To be more precisely, it's an expanding polyurethane foam I use. However, that doesn't change the process in general.

(My brain somehow connected the words foam and latex strongly, probably because a lot of the pro puppet makers cast their models from foam latex that needs to cure in an oven. – Sorry for that!)

Thanks to Nick Hilligoss for the reminder!