Ben Slug

One big inspiration of mine is Jim Henson. I particularly love his work for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dinosaurs, and The Dark Crystal. His work in particular inspired me to attempt to make my first full body puppet: the Banana Slug suit. This suit, or Benslug as my friends have deemed it, was concepted, workshopped, and constructed in just under one week, 100% by me.

Both the optical tentacles and lower sensory tentacles are movable from inside the slug, making a variety of sluggy facial expressions possible. Benslug also has two puppetable modes: 1) the suit mode, in which a person wears it on their head resting on an internal armature, and can look through the sensory tentacles, and 2) the handheld mode, in which one arm puppets the face, and the other puppets the tail...