I am pleased with the general look of this head using the balsa wood and how I have treated it. I am going to make a new head making sure the grain of the wood is facing the right way this time so that I can carve better detail into the facial features.

Before I started making test heads out of different materials I thought I would probably end up making the final thing out of papier mache. I absolutely HATED working with it in trying to make a puppet head and I definitely won't be using this method.
I started by applying milliput to the lightweigt sculpey core to give the head it's basic shape. I then applied papier mache ontop of this. Because of the scale of the head it was really fiddly to work with and I didn't manage to get any definition on his face. (I did give up really quickly without having got very far, but there is no point persevering if it's not going to work anyway!)

After my tutorial, it was suggested that I try adding very fine sporting injury foam dipped in latex and applied with spray mount ontop of a sculpey head. Once layered it can look like paper.

Firstly I wound some wadding around the eyebrow armature. I then sprayed a light layer of spray mount over the head and applied the foam with almost dried latex onto this. I used a coctail stick to tease it into the ridges on the face.

I really liked working with the wood, the only problem I came across which I didn't realise when I had started was that I was carving the wrong way into the wood. I had positioned the grain at the front where his face is so would do this again with it on top so as not so affect the carving. I'm not sure if this will be the material I will use yet, I still want to test other methods. The two main concerns I have for the balsa wood are whether the detail of the face will show up well under camera and what I will do about the eyes. I shall test these both!