I also made her a little pair of glasses from wire, foam and latex.

Such a sophisticated pooch!

Now for her body....

She's looking a lot better with some colour in her cheeks!

I mixed each colour in acrylic paint with latex before painting it onto her head which ensures thats her joints aren't made stiff by just painting acrylic onto her. This took me a while to do as I was working with a number of different colours I had to make sure each colour had dried before starting with the next so I didn't ruin the finish of the latex.

I experimented with a final coat of latex mixed with talcum powder. Talcum powder on its own rubbed into dry latex will give it a matte effect as dried latex is extremely shiney. This works well but once you start animating with the puppet the powder often rubs off easily with handelling, hence why I wanted to try mixing the talcum powder with the latex to leave to set. It worked to an extent by taking some of the shine out of the finish but did leave yellowed clumps where the powder hadn't seperate in the mix. Worth the try but not totally succesful!

I coloured some latex a light pink skin colour which I then applied around the eyeball in its socket, I also painted the inside of her mouth while I was at it and once her eyes are set I can get going with a different colour!

I first applied a layer of foam and latex directly onto the skull, covering everything other than the K and S hole where her body will be attached. For the hair surrounding her mouth I sandwiched the bits of wire between two pieces of foam covered latex which I also secured to her face.

Once this was dried I was able to cut around the excess bits of foam to reveal the strands of 'hair' and also cut away the bits of foam in the mouth that had been covering her little teeth.

I then started work on the strands of wire coming out of her head. As these were all higgledypiggledy unlike the straight line of wire in the sides of her face I decided to wrap each strand with a seperate bit of foam at a time.

I'm just waiting for these bits to dry before I can start to colour her...

The wire jaw and ears attach to the light weight sculpey 'skull'.

I then started to add some facial detail with milliput, which is how I also attached the hair wires to the cheeks...

... and to the head. Jess is currently looking like she's been struck by lightning but as soon as that milliput has dried I can start to apply her 'skin' over the armature.

I want Jess to have a moveable jaw, eyes and hair, so I am creating her head seperately to her body and will attach this later with K and S. The initial idea for her head armature is quite simple as it is similar to the heads I have made in previous projects, however I am unsure of how how I will attach her hair to the skull. This is an initial design to get the old cogs in my head working. I've decided as this project is going to be experimental in it being the first time I have made a puppet like this and because I don't need to follow any strict designs, I will create her head first before designing the size of the body armature so that the body doesn't end up restricting what I want to do with the puppet as a whole.

I've started to prepare to make Jess' armature. These are obviously nowhere near the final designs but an initial look into what a Chinese Crested's skeleton looks like. I haven't made a four legged puppet before so this is quite an experiment for me!

Here's my completed animation test using my puppet head with the replacement mouths. The eyes went a bit (a lot!) haywire but overall I was really pleased with the actual lip sync and liked the fact that I had managed to get the beard to move with the mouth, giving it a more realistic feel.

I took my replacement mouth puppet head into the studio, and shot some lip sync under a line tester. Here he is mid-flow:

So I took my heads into the studio to do some test animation with them, here are a few shots of them in the spotlight!