A while ago I posted an article which discussed four puppetry websites you’ll want to keep bookmarked. Now I’m presenting a list of websites which offer useful converters and generators that will help you make your puppets, sets and costumes. There’s everything from measurement converters to online printable rulers, and even some sites that are just plain handy for other reasons. The most interesting ones are at the bottom…

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This week I was contacted by someone for a set of custom-made shadow puppets, and it got me thinking how useful it would be to have a checklist of all the things that I should ask/do when in such a discussion. If you’ve been around the various puppetry forums, you will have noticed Andrew Young from PuppetVision previously offered up a creative commons version of his ‘Puppet Pricing Calculator’, an Excel file which is designed to help you calculate how much to charge per puppet. Well, in that same vein, I’m offering up my

Puppet Commission Checklist as an Excel file or PDF

for free and under the same creative commons licence (attribution only). If there’s anything there that you think should be added, please let me know and I’ll update the file.

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As with most topics on puppetry, the short answer is ‘it depends’. That’s not really all that helpful for a beginner though, so I’ll elaborate: certain puppet types are easier to make than others. But it’s still not as easy to describe as that…

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You could just start with the Beginners’ Guide to Puppetry. This really is more about professionalism than about giving you a "here’s how you build a puppet from A to Z" type article. For that, well, as I  say, head here.

This is one of those topics that irks me, because it’s a lot of myth and a lot of misunderstandings amongst the general public about how to go about making ‘professional puppets’. In this article I hope to both shed some light on those myths, and show you how you can go about doing it yourself at the same time. So let’s start with the basics: what do we mean by ‘professional’?

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