Mr Punch being painted

Mr Punch under the brush. The pink base coat is white emulsion paint stained with alazarin crimson acrylic. This shows a wash being applied over this, before being rubbed back with a dry brush. The wash coat is highly diluted acrylic, with applied mainly yellow oche, with a small amount of burnt sienna, and a tiny touch of crimson.

Mr Punch gets colour

Mr Punch starts to get colour. After 5 coats of white emulsion, 2 of pink, an oche wash over that, the detail is drawn on using Promarkers, a type of art grade marker pen.

Painting on raw papier mache

White emulsion paint applied to raw papier mache on the Saleman puppet head. The cracks are caused by the water being absorbed from the emulsion too fast.

The remedy is to sand it and apply another coat. This can be repeated several times, although if you use too many coats, you can end up losing fine detail, as the paint tends to fill in grooves and cracks.

Base coats for the cast

The assembled cast. Well, their heads anyway.

These are drying after having had their fourth base coat of white emulsion. Each coat of paint is lightly sanded to make it smooth. For hard to get at edges you can use wirewool. It is much more flexible for getting into details like eye sockets and nostrils!

Painting faces

I am starting to paint the faces of the puppets. The first thing is to cover the plain brown heads with a base coat of white. I have always used normal domestic white matt emulsion paint for this, which is not only cheap, but does the job.

However I thought I might try acrylic artist paint. This was to see if it was quicker between coats as acrylic dries very fast. It was not a good idea though. Acrylic holds brush stroke lines very visibly, which on a small puppet is a problem. It is also quite rubbery, and so the lines cannot be sanded down effectively between coats.