Shadow Puppet Theatre

Beginning my conscious life in Malaysia, my introduction to shadow puppet theatre was to spectacularly intricate paper puppets and stories of romance and demons.  It was something I forgot about except for a deep rooted aesthetic that draws me towards works by artists like Emma Kidd. 

 

Recently I was inspired by beautiful puppets from Moulin Roty but I had not yet come across their fabric shadow puppet theatre or I would probably have approached it differently.

Materials:
some black paper/card
brads for attaching moving parts of your puppets together
black paint
baking paper
bamboo skewers
hole punch
string
scissors or craft knife

1.  Draw out your puppets,  cut out, punch holes (it is a messy and inexact business to just push the brads through the paper) and attach moving parts together using the brads.
2.  Cut out a length of the baking paper about the width of a hallway or doorway and paint some scenery upon it.  We were running with five little monkeys sitting in a tree, teasing a crocodile.
3.  Once dry I used some clear tape folded over with the string at the fold attached to the top of the theatre scene leaving enough string on either side to tape to the wall, door frame or wind around the leg of a chair or table.  Repeat across the bottom.
4. Affix the skewers to your puppets, one per moving part, for the monkeys I was manipulating them by hand as well as the sticks but it was not a good idea to have so many moving parts.

While looking for some info on how other people had built a fabric shadow puppet theatre I came across two wonderful blog posts.

The first is from Mousehouse who used inspiration from a Seedling workshop to create a great Gruffalo themed box theatre and puppets.

The second is a Giverslog tutorial on creating your own beautiful fabric puppet theatre.