Hare-man puppet design

For my Hare's Bride production I need to design puppets for two characters. A girl and a hare. However, each character takes on different forms throughout the film so I will actually have to design about six or seven puppets. The 'girl' puppet is causing me a massive headache, so I have started with the hare. The hare starts off as a small hare a  (normal, or in proportion to how you would expect a hare to be), he then becomes a man-hare (man with hare's head) and his final transformation is into that of a beast-hare. The final hare is going to have an actual hare's face (taxidermy) and therefore this dictates the aesthetic of the other two hare forms. They don't have to be identical but there does have to be some continuity. Paper designs don't work that well for me, so the following pictures are a 3d sketch of the hare-man puppet, and indicate roughly how I want him to look. He is also animatable, so I should be able to do some animated tests in the near future.

                               His ears are made from actual rabbits ears, and his face is covered in rabbits fur, which I trimmed and glued. Sadly the glue is visable, and the fur is rough, the arms too long, plus the eyes are too big for his head. However, he does give the impresion of what I ultimatley want. The next one will be much better.




                                                                    The making of...

I made this maquette animatable but using a simple puppet making technique which we were taught in the puppet making workshop in the first semester. Its made with twisted wire, polymorph, foam, latex and milliput. The head is made from light sculpey, fur and ears, and plastic eyes. Sadly the head is just glued on at the moment. Will do the next one properly...