From Sketchbook to Sticker: The Tiny Detail that Showed Me the Way

Sock Puppet City is now offering stickers, magnets, and pins based on my sock puppet designs!

How did I get from sock puppet to sticker?

Read on for THE REAL TRUTH!

Confessions of a Puppet Person Volume 2

Bigger jaw? Goofier eyes? More realistic style? 

For years, I couldn’t map out how I wanted to translate my real life sock puppets into drawings in order to recreate them as fun treasures like stickers, magnets, and pins. I’d wander down a dozen paths to try to find what a re-imagining of a sock puppet ought to look and feel like, and it and I would get lost in the translation every time. Something pointing to the elusive puppet-y essence was missing...

Over those same wayward years, my sketchbooks had unsurprisingly become more and more stuffed with a whole other set of roughed-out sketches of puppets that I’d draw before building them. These were process drawings for myself or for clients, guides for physical objects to be used as a reference point. Sketches of puppet dogs, puppet married couples, puppet married dogs, puppet pop culture icons, puppet slices of pizza – an eclectic and ever-growing pile. 

Lost in my sticker-making journey, I looked back down that sketchbook-filled road, and what I’d been searching for was strewn everywhere among the drawings I'd already done. For the process sketches, I’d always included a small indication of the human wrist poking out of the bottom of the puppet in order to really give the sense that a hand was inside. So silly and obvious, and maybe only important to me, but there it was, a glowing little beacon of clarity.

I added that little wrist to the would-be stickers n stuff, and like a ship in the sea of puppet-y ideas, I'd charted the way. Avast, 'tis Sticker Island I see, starboard! (Now I totally want to visit Sticker Island...

And now, that fun stuff is for sale here at Sock Puppet City!