I figured that as real animals go, you don’t get much more fantastical than the tapir – an animal that looks something like a cross between an aardvark and a hog, but is in fact distantly related to the horse. It seemed a particularly apt metaphor for the end of summer since the tapir is critically endangered everywhere it exists – in sun-soaked South America and Malaysia.

According to Japanese myth, tapirs eat your dreams.

After performing at Beltane with a huge, towering puppet, I decided I’d rather scale back a bit for Samhuinn. There is something to be said for being so tall that a crowd of hundreds can see you clearly, but it’s also true that as soon as you are a head and shoulders above any crowd you can start making an impact from a long way off.

My tapir, Tara, was roughly life-sized, and positioned like I was giving it a piggy-back. Tara’s body is built right onto a backpack frame, using withies (bendable willow-sticks) to give it its shape, while the head, the back legs and the front feet are made mainly from thick aluminium wire – just bendy enough to work with my hands, but thick enough to hold its shape well. The front legs are built around sticks of bamboo, with a withie framework for bulk, and the feet attached by wire.

The whole thing has muslin stretched over it to create an illusion of solidity. The hind legs are attached to the waistband of the backpack frame. The front legs are attached to the top of the frame, and come over my shoulders so that I can control them with a sort of bamboo handle.

The trickiest engineering work went into the head, which is designed to be mounted on top of my own.  It is built out of wire, held together by bending bits around so they’re parallel, and sticking them together with gaffer tape. It’s possible to make surprisingly solid structures this way! The base of this is what I know as a Brazilian headdress, and uses a pattern and technique I got from Lindsay John in a workshop in 2008.

I made a hinged and counter-weighted jaw so that when I tip my head back, the mouth gapes open and reveals Tara’s fearsome tapir teeth and lolling tongue. For the hinge, I just twisted the jaw-wire around another wire going horizontally across the head. The principle is pretty straightforward – the weight keeps the jaw roughly level, while the rest of the head rotates around it – but getting the weighting exactly right required a fair bit of trial and error.

The dangling proboscis was even more fun. To make it wave back and forth in front of the head, I continued the cloth covering several inches beyond where the wire frame stops, making a sort of sleeve. I weighted this with a double-ring of wire bent into a pair-of-nostrils shape, something like this: ∞.

To make the puppet more visible in the night, and to give the wolves of winter something to show off after they dismembered Tara, I made a glowing brain out of two LED push-lights and cotton wool, and tied it to the top of the head using flimsy wool. I gave her cheap glass eyes from a craft-supply shop, and to enable even more dramatic dismembering, I attached them to optical nerves made out of red epoxy putty, and held them in place with wool.

Tara was joined on her journey by an extremely varied group of puppets – Hannah’s manticore Manny, Milk’s snake, Koralia’s fish-beast, Alison’s fairy-lit ram and Ross’s giant Beebeard, attended by spotters wielding sticks topped by a bird, a bee and a pig. Here’s a video of us all in action, and here’s a gallery of photos featuring Tara.

For this year’s Samhuinn – tomorrow night! – there are even more puppeteers. It’s going to be spectacular. My own puppet is a sort of a giant wolf-beast, on the Winter side of the battle this time. I’ll post all about it after I recover from the night itself…

First photo is by Star Cat (slightly edited by me); the second is by Brian Gratwicke; the last one is by digiphotoniel. All others taken by the author.

It’s an interesting challenge to decorate a USB drive, because you start out with a sort of rectangle a few millimetres thick, and it’s probably best not to make the final product very much bigger than that, so that it doesn’t take up too much space in pockets and can still be plugged into computers which might not have much space around their USB sockets. That means you’re constrained to subjects which can be plausibly fitted into a long, thin cuboid with a minimum of protrusions. You also ideally want things with a head or some other part which can be unobtrusively removed, with a join just at the right distance from one end…

The basic technique is pretty straightforward – you just mix up the epoxy putty with the hardener, roll it into a sheet and cover the drive in it. Leave space for anything you don’t want to obscure, like the LEDs most pen drives have that light up to show when they’re active, or loops for keyrings. There are two approaches you can take at this stage. One way is to use a thin sheet and add more putty to that – freshly-mixed epoxy putty sticks extremely well to almost anything, but especially itself. The other way is to use more putty to begin with, and extrude or carve from that.

There are many different varieties of epoxy putty available. I’ve been using Sylmasta A+B (formerly SuperCarve), and so far I’m very happy indeed with the new reformulated version of this – the colours are pure and vivid, where before the blue and the yellow were both slightly greenish². They’ve also extended the range to include brown and black, so it’s now possible to mix almost any colour from those available. For about £50 I got 250g of each of five colours, which should go a looong way. I have also had good results using metallic powders you can rub into the putty while it’s still soft. Most of the powder sticks well to the putty if it’s rubbed in well enough, but it’s worth varnishing these afterwards to be safe.

So far I’ve made three USB monkeys, a couple of aliens, a zombie badger that runs Linux and a fish that really didn’t work the way I wanted it to. I might make a crocodile next. Any other suggestions are welcome, whether or not you want to buy them yourself! As ever, I am very happy to take commissions…

1. thumb drives, flash drives, whatever you want to call them…
2. I’m told their white has been reformulated to be brighter, too, but I still haven’t used up all of my 500g block of the previous formulation so I haven’t tried that yet.

I first got enthused reading about Magic Sculp, but eventually established that even the cheapest UK supplier I could find, Sylmasta, charges around three times as much as it goes for in the US (and about twice as much as I pay for the same weight of polymer clay) – but as it happens, they also sell their own brand of epoxy modelling putties, Sylmasta A+B (white, or at least very light grey) and Super Carve (available in a range of colours), which also come highly recommended by random people off the internet. Milliput is the only epoxy putty I’d been exposed to in person before, and it’s very easy to get hold of – but it’s relatively expensive, and not very highly regarded by most of the sculptors I’ve seen expressing opinions.

Epoxy putty of any variety has several advantages over the likes of Fimo and Sculpey – it doesn’t require baking, it adheres firmly to almost any surface and it ends up being far stronger and far harder. On the other hand, it has a faintly unpleasant petrochemical smell, requires a bit more work and tends to work out more expensive (at least in Europe).

The putty starts out in two parts, a resin and a hardener, and you need to thoroughly mix and knead them before you start. This is probably best done with gloves really (at least according to some sources) but I’ve been doing it bare-handed so far without any obvious ill effects. As soon as it’s mixed, it starts hardening – on average, you’ve only got a couple of hours to work with it before it’s really hard, and in the first hour or so it goes from being distinctly on the floppy side to being really very firm; depending on what you’re making, the firmness might be very desirable or a big pain.

Me being me, the first thing I made was a cat. This was fun, and went fairly smoothly, but it brought out what to me is the most striking difference between epoxy putty (at least, A+B) and the polymer clays I’m used to: It’s near-total lack of elasticity. It’s one of those things you don’t think much about until it’s gone, but it turns out to make a big difference. I started to extrude limbs in the way I usually do when I make cats, and found I kept needing to smooth over the cracks I was making as I went.

One advantage of this is that things stay where you put them much more readily than they do with polymer clay, which sometimes springs back into place a little. Also, the putty is very quick to bear the impression of anything that presses against it, which is potentially very useful even if it isn’t always desirable. It’s not sticky to the touch, despite its excellent adhesive qualities when left in place – but it did prove sticky enough to easily attach little beads for eyes, which is handy given the limited range of colours I currently have available.

Once it’s cured it has a pleasing weight to it, and it’s really good and hard; it feels altogether far more substantial than polymer clay, and it’s easy to beliebe what I’ve read about its vastly greaters strength.

After the cat I still had lots of putty left over which I needed to use before it set hard, so I set to work making a human face. Humanoid, anyway… the squishiness of the material tripped me up a bit here – it is putty, and it feels and works like it. The head came out okay in the end, but it’s sort of… meltier than I’d really intended.

I regretted not leaving the putty to firm up for a while before trying to do something like that, but then when I did leave a bit more to harden, I ended up going away for too long and it was almost impossible to work! We live and learn though, and I always expect to make mistakes when I try out a new medium.

I made the same mistake again when I tried out the bright read Super Carve I bought – it’s noticeably a good deal softer than the A+B, and the dinosaur I made kept sagging gently to one side or the other for a long time after I first made it, as if it was drunk and sleepy. I straightened it up repeatedly, but in the end it still sort of slopes forwards and to one side; it’s alright, it mostly just looks like it’s staring at something much smaller than itself, but I made sure to leave it for about half an hour before I started working on my next project – a big dragon, to which I will return once it’s finished.