Dayton Regional S.T.E.M School
COLLEEN NICOLE FULTON
Portfolio
PUPPETS ON STRINGS
The very first day I was told 7th grade was making marionettes I already started generating ideas on paper, after three required drafts of ideas I came to one I just loved. It was an charcoal drawing of an three headed dragon, each head expressed an simple mood one looking at the positives of events, one looking at the negative of events, one just ignoring the positives and negative (almost like the middle man). Well once we picked our favorite draft we moved on to puzzling together what our marionettes personalities are. What is its name, what does it sound like, what it looks like, how does it act. This was really fun for me because I got to create two minds of their own personalities, ideas, dreams, goals. Around that time was when I realized only a few people’s marionette was not in shape of a normal human, only a few people did animal-like figures, which was okay with me because it gave me a challenge to work on with stringing together my marionette. After all of the preparation of learning how to do special stitching, what our limbs should look like, how to treat materiel’s in the class room and so on, we started to work on drawing our limbs for our marionette on our own fabrics. Mine of which was an transparent brown fabric that shined a bright purple when in the light this fabric will go over a dark red fabric to give it a unique scaly color. Then came carving out our marionette out of this frail foam which was a challenge when you have three heads that needed to be exactly the same. But with my background experience with Paper Mache finishing my three marionettes heads was simple. When all parts of my marionettes body were stitched together and was stuffed I got to work on the most challenging part of the whole project, stringing together limbs to the controller. Of course out of my luck trying to connect the strings together with the controller I found out that I would just be better off just having two heads so that’s where my middle man disappeared. And then I have a finished marionette, one I truly adore too! I believe that this whole project would go under the quality creativity because it allowed you to create something only you can really make what you want it to be without any restrictions.



