Hi all,

I made a blinking eye puppet for the first time last year, and it worked well, except for one thing. Front on, the eyes look fine, but side on and she has a very flat profile. I'm going to be making some new human muppets soon, and want some blinking eyes - how do I improve on my building technique to make the eyes better?

The following shows the eyes and how they work in her head:











(For more info, I wrote a blog post ages ago on how I did it:
http://puppetsinmelbourne.com.au/index.php/faq/2007/01/11/blinking_eyes)

How can I easily improve on the eyes: is it a matter of building up some foam around the eyes so they have more shape (ie. eyebrow ridges, etc.), or hollowing out? Do I need to find a better way of mounting the eyes, so that they are on the outside of her face, rather than inside?

I've just been watching Tom's tutorial on Puppeteer's Unite - would this technique work well with human puppets?

Yes it would! 

I think that it is the most popular method.   Just another thought......you could also add a spring so they bounce back open on their own instead of you having to use your finger for both opening and closing them.

You could add a piece of bleach bottle inside of the head to give it some sturdiness as you build the eyes then the head won't deform when you blink and you could also mount the spring to the plastic to do the above suggestion if you want.

Hope this helps......

Daryl H

Thanks Daryl! Sounds like a very good plan to me. I might have a practice go on some scrap materials and see how it goes.

Hi all,

I have now uploaded my video for my new blinking eye puppet, which experiments with Tom's tutorial. I wasn't 100% happy with it - mainly because of my crappy building on this particular puppet, but also because it's not quite the look I need for human blinking eyes. (I realise it could be modified, but actually, I prefer my previous technique; just need to modify that one to get rid of the horrid profile problem)

Anyway, here's the link:

http://puppetsinmelbourne.com.au/index.php/faq/2008/04/28/how_to_make_blinking_puppet_eyes_part_th

Hello,
Nice puppet. The only thing is that it seems that the eyelids are attached to the eyeballs in the video? The eyelids need to be free moving and thus attached a few millimetres above the eye ball so it can nicely manoeuvre over the eyeballs.

I just followed the instructions in the tutorial. The eyelids are attached to the top of the metal wire, and to the top of the head. It isn't actually attached to the eyes themselves.

The manoeuvreability is more to do with the fact that I screwed up the trigger (too short), and am very bad at performing with puppets.