I’m sure I’m not the first to use this method for the eyes, but I never came across anything like this during my searches on how to setup puppet eyes. On my first few puppets I painted round white circles on the head and then used vaseline to attach a pupil (made of baked black clay). I think I heard about the vaseline trick on the dvd extras for Frankenweenie. Basically I used the same concept of a white surface with a black dot for a pupil, that could be slid around the surface. I had some tiny magnets that I ordered from www.animateclay.com, but never used them for anything. I bought some push pin/thumb tacks of different sizes. The picture below shows the magnets, a black tack, and a silver tack. Silver was Jay’s eyes and black was Kevin’s eyes. I sanded the surface of the tacks down and painted a few coats of white paint. Then I used a permanent marker to color the front side of the magnet. Don’t color the back or sides, it rubs off on the white as you slide around. While animating every so often I will just touch up the pupil magnet with my permanent marker.
Here are the different eyelid shapes I used for both characters. I had a bunch for Kevin, but I think really only used a few since I was animating on 2s.
Here is a close up of the Kevin puppet on set
