Part 2 of making puppet heads - this one requires sculpting in clay, making a plaster mould, then casting in silicone rubber. The sculpting and mouldmaking are the same for casting in any flexible material like foam latex or urethane.
Doing this in front of a time lapse camera is difficult, and I will probably have to cast the head again and do a proper job, but this gives an overview of the process. Like my other tutorials it's really fast, so you will probably need to watch it more than once, and resort to the pause button to read all the captions. Sorry! But at 5 minutes long it's taking over 2 hours to upload. But check out my friend Ron's tutorial on making a mould for a puppet body at his AnimatorIsomer channel if you want the slow detailed approach - 3 parts totalling half an hour just to cover making the mould. Stop Motion Magazine has some good tutorials on puppetmaking too.
This head is made for use with build-up bodies which I covered in another tutorial - in fact, at the end i put it on the same body I showed being made. (Some viewers of my other tutorials may recognise the thing that appears behind the finished puppet - I wanted a tentacle but I didn't have one.)
A full body, all-silicone puppet will take another tutorial, and I'm still getting on top of the challenges with silicone - mostly I've used foam latex for casting full puppets. But a head is a good place to start, they are easier!
Thanks to composer Brian Boyko who made this music - "Dragonfly" - available copyright free at the public domain site FreePD.