A simple wire armature requires only annealed aluminium armature wire for the spine, arms, legs and neck, epoxy putty or similar, a drill and some pliers.

Firstly you need some alluminum wire. You can buy this at any decent art store or craft store.

Then you need some epoxy putty. This a clay like putty that dries ROCK hard after sculpting. The U.K type is called Milliput( google it)or if you can't get your hands on that just oven bake clay will be alright for a beginner.

If your puppet will have tie downs, you need nuts and screws. Tie downs are screws that come up from a hole in your set floor and screw into a nut in the puppet's feet. Then the screw is tightened against the floor with a wing nut.

To start off with you need to twist 2 strands of wire together. To do this quickly you can put 2 pieces side by side and screw the ends into the tip of the drill. Then you secure the other end with a vice or your foot and drill slowly, so they twist together.

The other way of doing this is getting one piece of wire, bending it in half, putting a pencil into the bent over area and wrapping the wire around so the pencil is secured in a loop. Then you would put the other end in pliers and hold the handles tight, or in a vice and then twist the pencil around.

You should make 4 pieces of twisted wire. One for the spine, one for the arms and one for the legs and one smaller looped piece for the head. Now you have to attatch them them together. You take the spine piece and unravel the two twisted wires untill you have two lengths of single wire coming from both ends. Then you bend the arm length in half like a U and wrap the pieces coming off the end of the spine around the bend. You do EXACTLY the same for the legs.

After that you could add epoxy putty or clay onto the chest and hip areas to build up those parts of the armature.

Type in STOPMOSHORTS in google and visit the first link. Go onto gallery at the top and then select tutorials in the options. There are a number of video tutorials there.

Nofby

Note: The alumminuim wire should be annealed armature wire. You can but this in Marc's shop.

also, don't buy the terracotta milliput! It crumbles and doesn't go 'rock hard'

and newplast doesn't stick to it very well either