Yes you are being to hard on yourself! He looks great.

Ah, but Na, we've learned from your mistakes and benefited from your knowledge! Your contributions to puppet sciences lay the foundation for new researchers to create new and even more fascinating puppets! ;D

Haha - as a science fan and a puppeteer that cheered me up immensely!
Thank you!

I agree with Shawn... the eyes are great! He looks so wide-eyed and cute

I totally understand what you're saying Na! I nick named my first puppet Franky, short for Frankenstein. Mind you I wasn't going for a monstrous look. I believe much as Dr. Megan has suggested that starting out now a builder has so much more reference material from those of us who went before. Also there are SOOOOO many more resources in general about puppet building readily available now. At least it makes my ego feel better to believe that is the largest contributing factor to the difference in the quality of our first builds.

I know when I first began it seemed like a secret science that you could only learn by being somehow inducted into the society of builders who knew and used the secrets. I really felt a bit like Indiana Jones trying to uncover the secrets of this mystical process. Of course it could have been the leather coat and brown fedora that made me feel like Indy...

Oh, I agree. The internet of course has done wonders for beginners, but I'd also bet print-on-demand publishing also helps. Before you'd have to find a publisher willing to print your books; now you can do it yourself, meaning more people can write and publish books on niche topics that normally wouldn't sell well enough for publishers to be interested.

Beginners normally would have to seek apprenticeships to get any experience or knowledge... now we just check out videos or patterns online.

I was actually the same: locally puppetry isn't well advertised, even among professional theatre people. Our branch of the puppetry organisation UNIMA was impossible to learn about (unless you already knew about it, catch 22) and puppeteers were hard to find about online. 'Secret science' is definitely how I would have described the local community. It's why I share so much info now, because I knew how hard it was to find info then.

I'd say though each of us is our own Indiana Jones - it took me a while to find my style, learn secrets/tricks of my own making, etc.

I like to think of puppetry as magic but with more sharing