The Making of Wayang (A Traditional Javanese Shadow Puppet Show)

The making of shadow puppets is a long and painstaking process. Skin of a female buffalo of about four years of age, the ideal type for texture and strength, is dried, scraped and cured for up to 10 years to achieve stiffness and eliminate warping and splitting. On maturity, skins are carved and perched to fashion the required character. This technique involves extensive knowledge of iconography and physiognomy, since all lines, angles of the head, slant of the eyes and mouth, profile of the body are specific to the character. When carving is completed, the traditional pigments including powdered burnt bone for white, lampblack, indigo, yellow ochre and cinnabar for red in a gelatinous medium mixed from dried egg-white. Gold leaf and pigment are applied in a medium of protein glue derived from fish bones. The cempurit or manipulating rods are made of buffalo horn, while the studs attaching the jointed arms t othe torso are of metal (sometimes gold), bone, and bamboo or in rare courtly examples, gold studded with diamond.