First of all I have to apologies for not posting this week but I was just so obsessed with the making of Wonderland.
I have wanted to make this one for some time and I am celebrating its completion
The graphic's for the facade front and all the puppets are entirely from John Tenniel illustrations, who illustrated the Lewis Carrol books. There is one exception... I did use scans of the book spines too. The columns are taken from an illustration in "Threw The Looking Glass". I overlaid the column over the book spines from the image where Alice and the frog stand before the door that says "Queen Alice". The rest of the theater graphic's are from various images from both books. In the making of the puppets, I tried to stay true to the artist but did make some necessary line changes by combining two or more original images so that I could articulate them. The graphic's for this is available in my etsy store. This is a little larger than you would think. I saved the images to my camera disk (but you could use a flash drive) and took it to my local printer and had the theater facade printed on a large format printer 11 X 14. I did not enlarge the puppets, they are just printed on standard paper the size they come. I left them large in case you wanted to use them as paper dolls. If your going to make a smaller theater you will need to size them down 50 %
I used an old jewelry box found at my local thrift shop for the base. After cutting slots in the top for the puppets to dangle through, I covered it with scrapbooking papers and added some model railroad turf on the top.
I made wire wands to manipulate the puppets with (you can see them laying in front of the theater in the last of the theater photos) However since I wanted to display it like a diorama when it was not show time, I also made little stands for each puppet. The little tea table is available to print below!I have indented to do a tutorial on how I do the theaters and there puppets but life just keeps getting in the way and I still don’t have it done.
Here is a quick synopsis of how I do it... I use spray glue to attach the graphics to a light weight matte board...like the gift boxes you would find at the dollar store. Then I cut them out and sand the edges with a emery board. I then use a marker or paint pen to color the edges of the cardboard ( I use a skin tone for the dolls but for the theater I would use a matching color ) ... angle the marker or pen from the back side so you do not accidentally mark the front of the image and color the edges. On the theater facade, I covered the backside with scrapbooking paper so that the edges that extended past the “theater box” would still look nice from the backside of the theater. I did the little table much the same only I spray glued it to a light weight tin. I just bought a large tin at the thrift shop and used the lid from it. Then I cut it out with kitchen shears and sanded the edges smooth with a metal fingernail file. This way it will support the weight of the tea set.
I had two copies of the facade printed on photo paper then laminated them to chip board. The I cut out elements from the second copy and glued them on top of the first layer. Like the frog and fish. This popped them out of the background and gave it a little dimension.
The little flower faces were made last year at an art retreat I went to with Artistic Souls. I knew I would use them someday :)) The tree was purchased at hobby lobby's floral department. Then I untwisted the bottom and re-twisted it to look like tree roots.
Now for the goodies! Below is the Tea Table I used ... be sure to click on the image for the larger printable version.
Enjoy!
