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Description
Last spring I made shadow puppets of lady Amalthea, king Haggard, the Red Bull and the Unicorn from Peter S. Beagle's "the Last Unicorn". I had plans for a Prince Lir, Molly Grue and Schmendrick as well, but discovered how *bleep*ing long it would take just to do the main four. That's because of all the piercing I had to do. Their designs are loosely based on malasian and javanese shadow puppets although they are made with copper rather than parchment and leather.
Technically, you wouldn't actually see the puppet, just the shadow it cast, but I did a little ornamentation anyway- in this case extensive chasing to give her a unique texture. She was originally super-shiny copper, but you can see where she's starting to take on the natural patina of copper.

The Unicorn is the most complicated of the puppets I made, and I had to be very careful to keep her graceful but still a working puppet and give her similarities to the human Amalthea. Her back leg is articulated at hip, knee and pastern, her foreleg is articulated at shoulder and knee, she's also articulated on her neck and at all her control rods (all THREE of them!). She looks really fierce when you lower her head and neck so she can "charge".

(it is a heck of a lot harder to use a shadow puppet than I ever realized- I got to put on a short play of TLU for my metalwork class and made a complete idiot of myself)

Description
Last spring I made shadow puppets of lady Amalthea, king Haggard, the Red Bull and the Unicorn from Peter S. Beagle's "the Last Unicorn". I had plans for a Prince Lir, Molly Grue and Schmendrick as well, but discovered how *bleep*ing long it would take just to do the main four. That's because of all the piercing I had to do. Their designs are loosely based on malasian and javanese shadow puppets although they are made with copper rather than parchment and leather.
Technically, you wouldn't actually see the puppet, just the shadow it cast, but I did a little ornamentation anyway- in this case extensive chasing to give her a unique texture. She was originally super-shiny copper, but you can see where she's starting to take on the natural patina of copper.

The Unicorn is the most complicated of the puppets I made, and I had to be very careful to keep her graceful but still a working puppet and give her similarities to the human Amalthea. Her back leg is articulated at hip, knee and pastern, her foreleg is articulated at shoulder and knee, she's also articulated on her neck and at all her control rods (all THREE of them!). She looks really fierce when you lower her head and neck so she can "charge".

(it is a heck of a lot harder to use a shadow puppet than I ever realized- I got to put on a short play of TLU for my metalwork class and made a complete idiot of myself)