Imagining Puppets with Lucky Platt
Do puppets know that they’re puppets?! We spent two days with author, illustrator & artist Lucky Platt to find out.
IRW’s busy spring semester ended with a grand finale: a two-day program for homeschooling families at the Lubec Memorial Library. Author and illustrator Lucky Platt guided eager kids through the process of imagining a character and bringing them to life.
It’s no easy task! First sculpting models for characters’ heads from clay and then using papier mache on top, it was tricky work to carefully remove the dried papier mache casts. Dedicated kids prevailed, embellishing soft fabric bodies for their puppets and painting their heads and faces.
Around the room, there are puppets in tuxedos, puppets with handkerchief bundles, paws, hats, pockets, shawls—all beginning to come to life!
“At the end of today, there will be characters that have never existed before, never been seen before!” Lucky reminds us.
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Participants show off their creations.
Why Puppets?
Beyond creating a fun experience for children, the process of designing, creating & utilizing puppets offers numerous learning benefits. Puppets engage children’s creativity, fine and gross motor skills, and are a tool for social and emotional learning. They allow children to dream up whole characters, think deeply about the concept of identity, and are a jumping off point for storytelling. Children in Lucky’s program were delighted to take their new characters home. There, they can continue getting to know them and writing their life’s stories.
So, do these puppets know that they’re puppets?!
Most children’s puppets greeted Lucky’s armadillo handpuppet politely and explained that yes, of course they know they’re a puppet. One child took another view.
“Well, yes and no,” he told us, “He knows he’s a puppet, but he also likes to think of himself as a human.”
About Lucky
Lucky Platt creates children’s picture books, life size bear paintings, crankies, mixed media animations, relief prints, paper sculptures and more delights in her lakeside home studio in Burnham, Maine.
Lucky’s debut picture book, Imagine a Wolf (Page Street Kids 2021) was a 2022 Maine Literary Awards Finalist in Children’s, a 2022 Ezra Jack Keats Award Finalist in New Writers, a 2021 New England Book Award Finalist, and has been translated into Korean and Russian. Her stories explore themes of resilience, healing, positive self expression and inclusion, and are often illustrated in traditional art mediums such as oil paint, ink, gouache, graphite, paper sculpture, drypoint, pyrography and colored pencil.
