Troll Figure! Made from tennis ball - Process

This is Smokey Mike. He likes cookies and shiny objects, and his breath smells like petrol fumes. A piece of advice. Don't cut open tennis balls.

This was a summer project I completed last year for my art course, the brief was to make a doll or puppet using whatever we wanted.

Initially I intended to make a marrionette’-style puppet. I knew I wanted to make one of my own creatures, and while doing research I found an article where someone had made a string puppet using an artists manikin, modifying the limbs to make them loose and dangly and attatching the strings etc.. I liked this idea and imagined I could use the limbs to a simillar effect with my puppet, but after some thought... and because I’m lazy... I decided to make use of the firm but malleable limbs as they were and make a sort of poseable doll I could display on my desk!

PROCESS:

I began by writing down ideas, ways of constructing, various materials I could use. I broke the project/doll down into parts I could manage and work on individually, and then put together systematically. (delicate parts like the eyes and teeth needed to be added on last, after the heavy-handed process of cutting holes and fixing the limbs. (harder than it sounds!)

Materials used:

• Tennis Ball
• Manikin Limbs (wood)
• ’Das’ modelling clay
• Black Acrylic Paint
• Little bits... (fluff, pins, tack)

A tennis ball was an Ideal base for the body- as it’s perfectly round and had the ‘fluffy’ texture I wanted. I started by cutting the mouth shape into the tennis ball- (which was extremely hard to do)

Overall, though it didn’t go exactly as planned, I'm happy with the result. The arms can be adjusted freely, while the legs are pretty much kept static, though they can be bent slightly.

Thanks for stopping by!