We were asked to make a portrait-puppet of sorts. She wanted the character to look like her, if she were a Muppet.
This puppet is an example of a mashup of two of our new puppet styles. Mary's head is exemplary of our round, "Deluxe-Style" head. Her body is similar to how our "Simple-Style" puppet bodies will be. The hands were mittens by request.
Here's a bit of her in action:
We had been considering offering portrait-puppets like this for a while. This this request was a bit different than what we had expected however, in that Mary had basically done the hard part for us.
As eager as we were to try our hand at puppet-izing someone, she knew exactly what she wanted, and had designs ready for us.
We absolutely love it when we get design drawings.
That made our job of finalizing the character design really easy. There wasn't much for us to do other than be sure the shapes and proportions were right.