In our last Kick-About, we looked up — to steel, symmetry, and the Art Deco ambition of the Chrysler Building. This week, the scale shifts dramatically. Our prompt is finger puppet — small, handmade, and full of character. From monumental architecture to something that fits on the tip of a finger, the focus turns to play, storytelling, and the life we can give to the simplest of forms. As always, the works that follow were made in a short time — and for all previous editions of The Kick-About, go here.
Gary Thorne
“This prompt was too fitting—certainly a premonition, being delivered a week before this holiday kitchen incident. But as with KA you go with the flow. Hospital and antibiotics did not end up dismissing this inspirational prompt!”
Kerfe Roig
“I have to admit, the first thing I thought of was the Mexican La Mano Poderosa with the saints on the fingers. Then I thought it would be nice to use birds instead of saints. And then I had to embellish the hand too…”
James Randall
“This challenge was my first attempt to include layers of Procreate lines – nothing fancy – just adding a bit of texture to an image inspired by some Chaucer characters.”
Phil Gomm
“As a kid, I was fascinated by carnivorous plants, so whenever I think ‘puppets’, I think about Audrey II—the all-singing venus-fly trap from Little Shop of Horrors. For this much more diminutive prompt, I looked instead at Drosera—or sundews—those no-less otherworldly plants characterised by their filaments and sticky beads. I set about creating a five-fingered colony of sundews (cue some inexpert French knitting and some raised eyebrows as I made five phallic-looking ‘sleeves’ with polysterene balls shoved into one end). I finished them off with some wire tendrils and teeny red beads, and then, to bring them to life, I made a short film to see them in action. I was further inspired by those time-lapse sequences you see of seeds germinating etc, which always have a slightly unsettling ‘agitation’ about them, so, to achieve that, I converted all the video footage from 25 frames per second to 12 frames—which created that glitchier feel.”
philgomm.com / behance.net/Phil_Gomm
Lewis Punton
“I loved the latest Kick-About prompt, Finger Puppets, and found myself quite organically drawn to the characters of Punch and Judy. I’ve always found the mischievous pair rather creepy — there’s a kind of nostalgia attached to those little puppets that is unsettling and oddly familiar, like the eerie sense of being surrounded by things that feel from another time you never fully understood. I knew I wanted to treat this as a mini-project rather than aim for a finished piece, so between work-from-home meetings I started making scratchy story sketches to create a slightly more friendly version of Punch — the sorts of sketches and doodles that often go on to inform moments of flavour in the animated favourites that first drew me to study animation ten years ago.“
Next time, our prompt turns to the spare, luminous compositions of Nicolas de Stael.
Red's Kingdom 
Leave a comment