I'm really enjoying watching this puppet come together, step by step. I so admire your ability to engineer the various pieces of the puppet to bend and move the way you want them. This is going to be a great looking marionette!

Thanks, Chris.  It's nice to have a place where I can post this stuff and get some feedback.   
It's been a while since I posted any of my drawings for this project.  I do keep drawing in my sketchbook, and nothing's really set in stone until the puppet's finished, so here are some pages that may or may not make it into the final project:

As you can see, my tendency is to cram everything that I'm working on onto the same page, so enjoy the drawing of Karagon, a character from the puppet musical that I'm writing.

And now the latest work I've done on the Gryphon proper.  I've worn my sanding barrels down to the paper, and can't afford any more right now, so I've moved on to the sewing.  I eyeballed a shape onto a piece of paper, folded the paper around the body, edited, and then sewed an experimental piece of fabric.  This is it:

Then I edited again, sewed again, and went through the same process to make an experimental leg.  Here it all is together:

His little white PJs remind me of Max's wolf suit in Where The Wild Things Are.  Rawr!
I'm having trouble getting the fibre-fill in around the skeleton, and now a want to sew the toes into the feet.  I'm hoping that the latter will somehow facilitate the former, though I'm not sure how that could be.  We'll see.
Oh, I should mention that the current plan is to have a fringe of feathers to conceal the gap between the ribcage and the abdomen while still allowing for freedom of movement.  Again, we'll see.

It turning out great! Good job

Sometimes going backwards is going forwards.

I'm not going to post any pictures with this bit of text, but if you'd like to see how the puppet looks right now, just look back to the pictures of it before I started the sewing.  That's right, I threw the sewing work away because I wasn't happy with it.  Sometimes I start to slow down on the work, and feel a sort of block, and though this is sometimes due to nothing more than laziness, at other times it's because I am subconsciously dissatisfied with the work.  The sewing block was of the latter kind.  While reading "Towards a Poor Theatre" by Jerzy Grotowski I finally realized, consciously, what the problem was.  Grotowski asks what is absolutely essential to the theatre, without which it could not exist.  His answers are pretty drastic, but they made me question my own approach to puppetry, and here's what I realized:  For me, the mechanical component is the most interesting part of puppetry, the part that inspires me to keep working.  So the reason the sewing wasn't satisfying me was because it was covering up all of my clever contraptions.  I think that I was striving too much for a sort of photo realism incompatible with my style of work.  But now I feel my creative energy surging again.  I was concerned that the separate pieces of the abdomen would be seen by the audience, but now I realize that that's just fine; No one's going to be surprised that a puppet should look more like a puppet than the creature it's supposed to represent.  

They've come to see puppets, and that's what they'll get.

Bravo!  I way let the joints and parts show!  I am often like you and spend way to much time trying to figure out how to cover something up or make it to real.  I still do that sometimes but have gotten better. If you look as some older wood carved marionettes you often see all the joints in all their glory!  Have you ever noticed that in Pinocchio, that the way they denote the difference between the "real" boy and the puppet is by removing the joints?    

I am really pleased that you decided to not go with a cloth cover. I don't think you would have ever come up with something you liked that still let the puppet move.  You mentioned that you where going to use feathers at one time.  I think you can still do that.  In fact if you wanted to you could use tufts of fake fur on your puppet also.  You would not so much be making a skin as adding texture to the puppet that also gave it more movement. For example on your upper part of the leg if you decide you want to soften the current square look you could add some fur only to that section and not over the joints.  Depending on the fur you choose it might ever "hide" the joints a bit but not restrict them.

what a great marionette. I see this post now for the first time a I am amased about your skills how you make it. You are a professionel !!!! I like the what you make notices in your book, it is a great idea to do it in this way.
I am looking forward that your marionette is finised !!!!

Thanks, folks.  I do still plan to give the puppet form and texture, I'm just avoiding anything that will interfere with the motion I've worked so hard to establish.  But that's still a ways away, especially because of some new developments:  Bbased on some references to it I heard here on the forum, I found a copy of H.W. Whanslaw's Animal Puppetry.  It's good.  So good, that I want to try some version of the interior hip and shoulder joints he shows for horses.  I'm still working with a lot of foam rubber, so I have to figure a way to adapt his idea to my medium, but I think it will work.  Here is a picture with the new hip joint I made:

The idea is to have the big round flange fill the slot that it will eventually occupy.  That's why it's a circle, the only shape that doesn't change when rotated.  I made this piece with one of those hole saws that you attach to a drill, a tool that I've been trying to find a use for since I was about fourteen years old.  The drill bit that's used to set the saw is the perfect size for the doll-joint pins!  I'm going to have to carve a new pelvis, and I might also have to remake the rear piece of the spine.  And then remake the whole chest, etc.  It's fiddly, but it's something that I haven't done before, so I'm excited to experiment.  I don't want to get hung up on something just because it's already built; I have no deadline.

We are so much alike! I often do the same when building puppets.  In fact I think we maybe talked about this in PM.  Going along in a build then deciding to change how something is done mid stream. That is one reason I always say there is more then one way to build a puppet. Your hip joint is now more like how I did them on my dinosaurs although I was lazy and simply used plastic doll joints.

Cooool build. I cant wait to see the finished puppet.