Sven is a stop motion animation puppet, a character I designed and constructed for a project titled The Mystery Box, creating a character to interact with a box with unknown contents.
Sven is the first stop motion puppet I ever made and one of the tallest. Sven is 15” in height and 3” in width with a armature made from varied strength posable wire with structure support and additions made with Milliput, with the edition of Super Sculpey for the calf extension. The body was sculpted out of upholstery foam with a polystyrene ball for the head. I then covered the whole body in crepe bandages or tubular support bandages to be able to sew the outer material onto the puppets with ease, but also to cover the blue colour of the foam beneath it for the feet, hands and joints. After cutting out calculated and random pieces of a thin pastel pink and blue cotton, I then hand sewed each individual piece to each other and the bandages to create the final look. Additions to this final look included, acrylic teeth for the fingernails, toenails and spine, rubber dolls parts for the shoulder pad, foam sheets, plastic tubing, wire mesh and small clock cogs for the goggles, and Super Sculpey antlers. Most of these additions were attached the body using small clothing pins to look like bolts on the puppet. The eyes were also pins, however slightly larger and black in colour to stand out from the rest of his body.
