Since the air drying Fimo was too heavy a substance I decided to experiment with papier mache. I sculpted the head out of plasticine and then used kitchen roll (as it was thin) and PVA glue to coat the shape. It was difficult to get the kitchen roll in the eye sockets as it tended to disintegrate. I left it to dry and then once it was hard I made a small hole in the back of the head and then gouged out the plasticine from the inside with a pick, cleaning out the interior so that I was left with a hollow papier mache head. This was a little odd as I had used red plasticine and it did feel as if I was scraping my little character's brains out. It was very light weight as I desired and I also really liked the wrinkled texture it created. The head seemed pretty tough and durable, holding its shape, so I think it would work for stop motion in that respect.
The issue however, was that obviously you cannot manipulate the face to animate it. I had thought I could use replacement heads, making several heads that showed the transitions between the different facial expressions needed for the shot and then change them over on the puppet as necessary. This would not work though as for that you need to be able to keep the face the same but change it ever so slightly in increments each time, with creating a new sculpt each time it would be very difficult to keep any kind of continuity, you would need identical copies of the face which you could then slightly alter, but there wasn't a way to do that with the papier mache method. I do really like the texture of these though so I will look into using this somehow in future projects.
This last image was me putting the air dry clay over the top of the papier mache to eliminate the wrinkles, if a smoother face was desirable, while still keeping the head lightweight, rather than the whole thing being air dry clay. Obviously this is of no real use to this project for reasons stated above, but I was just experimenting.
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