The first shadow puppet

This is going to be a short one today, just to show you what I've been up to.

I wanted to get one of the shadow puppets started, so although it's incomplete, here's a picture:

As you can see, it's pretty small, but that's ok - I'll be using a highly focused beam to shine through it so it shouldn't be too fuzzy. Besides, what I really want is it to be little to start with so you can get the full idea of just how gigantic it was. This particular one is a reconstruction of Parapuzosia seppenradensis - a Cretaceous giant reaching an estimated 2.5m across! That's without all the palaver of tentacles, which I'll be adding later.

I started out with thick black card, copied my picture onto the back of it, then using a craft kinife cut the sections out one at a time, leaving the outer rim in tact, but then taking out the outline of the inner whorls to make sure that I got the full sense of that coiling. Then I cut up one of those coloured transparent document folders and stuck a bit of one onto the back - simple!

Further updates with shadow puppets to follow, plus news about my life-sized model of Arthropleura. Should be fun!

All the best!

Alex :)

Shadow Puppets!

Hello!

Welcome back to Let's Get Prehistoric! I've lots of stuff to write you about this week, but you know when an idea is just so exciting that you can't wait to say it?

I'm going to continue my work in papier mache, creating life-sized models and so on and so forth, but right now, I'm exploring the wonderful world of shadow puppetry. I'm really excited by the simple effectiveness of the medium, how you can change the size of your object by its proximity to the light, and how you can completely change a mood with a coloured gel. Hopefully this will take off and become a science/art combination that will really grab viewers' attention: I'm looking to get people of all ages interested in it, kind of a real suspension of reality combined with the usual 'life-sized' theme. Keep reading updates to find out how that's going - it's still a really embryonic idea, but we'll see where it goes.

Alright, so the dinosaur footprint has now been completed, along with a Triceratops scapula which was great fun to make.

The footprint dried out nicely over night, though there was a little bit of curl - I'd recommend weighting the edges if you do it at home - don't cut out around the edges until it's all fully dried to avoid it curling up over itself.

I painted it a sandy-yellow-orange colour with some sand mixed in to give it texture. I used an acrylic paint mix with a heavy body medium thrown in for again, that extra texture. Inside the footprint I painted a little darker just to emphasise the shape - this was for a party of 9 year olds, and I relally wanted to get them realising the scale of what we were dealing with. It really worked for them - there was the wow factor to start with, then the amusement when they discovered it was made of cardboard, then their science hats came on again and they all started climbing onto the print (of course since it's papier mache, it doesn't matter if they climb all over it) and worked out that 6 children could stand inside a T. rex footprint. A rather nice impromptu test of area, I thought, though they quickly worked out that the gaps between their feet were a problem - never mind, they had fun doing it.

The scapula was great to do - it worked really nicely. I found a picture online, copied the basic outline onto another sheet of cardboard and then proceeded to bulk it up with scrunched up bits of newspaper. I papier mache'd over that to give a smooth surface, then for the ridge the muscles join onto, I made sausages of tissue paper and pasted them down the centre of the scapula shape. When it was all dried and bulked up enough, I painted it a blackish-blue slatey colour, and then showed it to the children alongside a Muji woodcraft construction model of a skeleton ceratopsian (one of Triceratops' relatives, I forget which one) so they could see the scale we were talking about - they found the scapula on the model and compared it to the 3-foot one I was holding and one of them, at the top of his lungs, said "Wow! Triceratops was HUGE!" - and my work was done.

The footprint and scapula worked really well. I also made a section of Triceratops femur, but that was a bit more basic. Photos to follow. Keep reading for more updates!