Making Hands part 1

I wanted to put more effort in to making the armature hands for this puppet. The ones I made for my cowboy character at the end of 1st year were primitive to say the least. (i'd basically just stuck 5 pieces of twisted wire into a piece of Miliput and waited for it to harden, the result of which was fingers snapping/coming out of the miliput mid shot, with no spare hands. Luckily, shooting on a webcam had its good points! in that you can't tell that for the last 4 seconds of my performance piece, the hands are taped into the gun position)

For this puppet I have combined two methods. Firstly I wrapped a piece of 1mm aluminium wire around a washer, then hand twisted it to give a two strand piece. This was repeated another 4 times in order to give the 5 fingers I wanted. For the wrist, I used 2mm wire, giving it extra strength as if the wires had been the same length, the whole wrist might've moved when trying to simply move a finger.

 Using washers gives the wire something substantial to fix on to, I then epoxy glued the 6 pieces of wire in place before a palm of miliput is applied on top to further fix them. I have chosen to leave a hole in the centre of the hands incase objects need to be pinned to the hand through latex. There are also small pieces of miliput on the ends of the wire to avoid any contact between the aluminium and the latex during casting. This will avoid any tearing later on. The hands will now be epoxy glued onto a piece of smaller K&S, allowing them to be detachable, and then sculpted ready for latex casting.