Sculpting stories 

Katy Strutz is a stop-motion artist and sculptor whose character designs blend craftsmanship with storytelling. With a background in figurative sculpture and a passion for world-building, she has worked across animation, editorial illustration, and independent filmmaking. From her portrait of Aubrey Plaza for The New Yorker, to her fan-favourite Stranger Things puppets and imaginative interpretations of Beetlejuice, Strutz has carved a unique space in animation and editorial art. Drawing from historical art forms and contemporary pop culture, her stop-motion works serve as both a storytelling medium and an expressive art form. In this conversation, she shares insights into her creative process, the challenges of balancing artistic vision with industry demands, and the evolving role of practical effects in animation.

hube: Working on projects like Stranger Things must bring unique challenges. What’s your creative process for designing characters in such high-profile productions?

Katy Strutz: My series on Stranger Things was just fan art! I made those puppets shortly after graduating from art school and beginning work as a costume fabricator at Laika. While I loved the work and was learning a lot, I wanted to assert that I could craft entire worlds, not just details. Specifically, I aimed to practice cinematic image-making and experiment with puppetry as a method of holistic character design.

Fanart often gets dismissed as frivolous, but I think it’s a fantastic way to refine your style and showcase what you uniquely bring to something familiar. It’s so important to indulge your creative guilty pleasures – whatever gets your hands moving and keeps your art practice alive, just do it! Creating these puppets no one asked for is what ultimately opened doors for me to sculpt on productions and prepared me for future high-profile projects.

I begin with a strong 2D design as my blueprint for every puppet and then orchestrate how all the tactile elements will flesh out the character.

h: Stop-motion art demands both patience and precision. What drew you to this art form, and how did you get started with puppet-making?

KS: I like to say I’m lucky stop motion exists because it’s the perfect vessel for my lifelong obsessions with dolls, animation, and making things by hand. As a kid, I made Barbie movies, sewed ragdolls, and built miniature apartments out of cereal boxes. My happiest childhood memory is spending an entire summer making a movie with my best friend about our favourite lifeguard at the neighbourhood pool. It was a sprawling, multidisciplinary adventure – editing in iMovie, creating props, planning effects – and I’ve been addicted to giant creative projects ever since, tedium and all.

Interestingly, before college, none of this ever came up in my formal art education, which was always narrowly focused on academic drawing and painting. I discovered the Art of Animation books in high school, which led me to study illustration at RISD in hopes of becoming a Disney concept artist. In my sophomore year, I discovered I had a knack for figurative sculpture, and the work of Kent Melton became the rosetta stone that pointed me in the direction of stop motion. After that, stop motion was always the mountain I was moving towards, and all of the multidisciplinary inclinations I always had clicked right into place.

h: Collaborating with magazines and commercial clients requires balancing your artistic style with client expectations. How do you maintain your creative vision while meeting their needs?

KS: Step one is maintaining a creative practice separate from client work. Having something that’s just yours – no matter how big or small – gives you confidence and clarity about what you bring to the table. This helps you check your ego during collaborations and truly appreciate the opportunities they bring.

Step two is appreciating what collaboration and feedback bring to your craft. Many great directors abide by the ‘one for me, one for the studio’ approach, and ironically, those ‘for the studio’ projects often become their strongest work. Many iconic painters began as commercial illustrators. Constraints and client expectations sharpen your skills and push your creativity.

Working in animation, every little brushstroke is reviewed by a committee, but you learn that translating a 2D design into a dimensional character still leaves a ton of room for interpretation. In contrast, I’m always struck by the relative freedom of editorial work, but the tight deadlines push you to trim the fat and work smart. It’s all part of honing your craft and working toward mastery while contributing to something larger than yourself. Wax on, wax off!

h: Your New Yorker portrait of Aubrey Plaza captured her essence in a unique, tactile way. How did you approach combining personality and artistry in this project?

KS: Aubrey – iconic for her dark hair, dark eyes, and playfully deadpan demeanour – had just gone blonde, which created an immediate contrast to play with. She was having a real Hollywood starlet moment, so I drew inspiration from soft, feminine ’50s fashion editorials, using that glamour to underline her intensity.

In the interview accompanying the piece, she spoke about longing to disappear into different roles as a capital A actress but often ending up playing herself because directors always want to write her iconic personality into characters. This inspired the idea of casting the face multiple times to create an identical mask. I always try to consider what a sculpted portrait can do that a photo of a real person can’t.

h: You’ve worked with characters from various pop culture icons, such as Stranger Things and Beetlejuice. How do you approach adapting existing characters while adding your own creative spin?

KS: Howard Ashman described adaptation as communicating your love for something and showing people exactly what you see in it. I feel the same way about portraiture and iconic characters. Memory distorts, and interpretation can capture more of how something feels to an audience than it ever did in real life.

For Beetlejuice, I wanted to create something strikingly elegant. Tim Burton’s brilliance lies in blending playfully grotesque fantasy with high fashion and fine art. Interpreting his characters is challenging because his own stop-motion films are so influential and distinct, so I aimed to flesh them out in a different way.

For Lydia, I emphasised gothic beauty through contrast and texture, avant-garde styling through proportion, and Winona Ryder’s blend of authority and vulnerable youth. I drew inspiration from Schiele, Erté, and Alastair, approaching the photoshoot like a fashion editorial while grounding Lydia’s anatomy in realism in a way that Burton’s animated characters are not.

h: How has your background in sculpting influenced your work in stop-motion, particularly in capturing expressions and emotions through puppets?

KS: I think stop motion is a sculptural medium above all – a meeting point between fantasy and reality. Puppets are real objects, free from the constraints of physics, anatomy, or mortality, but grounded in real motion and light.

The possibilities for puppets are as broad as the entire history of figurative art. I go to museums and just see puppets. Everywhere. Sculpture is a tradition of playing with reality and abstraction. But even that only scratches the surface. When beginning a puppet, I like to ask myself if a puppet is a sculpture, a doll, a figurine, a marionette, a stuffed animal, a creature, a fairy, a real person, an illustration, or an oil painting. It can sway in so many directions and fleshes out the many answers for details of texture, colour, scale, and movement.

Figurative sculpture has captured the human imagination for our entire existence. Our modern opportunity is to see them all come to life.

h: The character-focused nature of your work often brings out intricate personality traits. How do you research and plan for each character’s distinctive look and feel?

KS: I start by distilling my impressions of a character, seeking unexpected connections to heighten their essence. It’s a game – what do they feel like? What era, texture, or materiality fits them? Or, how can I subvert these elements to reveal something new?

From there, I plan a hierarchy of visual components, from the figure’s design to environmental art direction. The challenge is holding this vision through the winding steps of fabrication while executing with precision to achieve the intended whole.

I feel like stop-motion characters often end up in an expected place, so I try to avoid the typical look and explore other sculptural conventions.

h: What would you say has been the most technically challenging project you’ve worked on? And why?

KS: I’m currently making my own short film, and it’s easily the biggest creative undertaking I’ve ever attempted. Writing, storyboarding, fabrication, animation – it’s a thousand challenges in a row.

One of the hardest parts is the sheer stamina required. Stop motion is inherently slow, and committing to a short film in this medium, especially in a country with virtually no funding for such projects, balancing the film with paid work and personal life is exhausting, and progress often feels invisible since there’s no immediate validation. It’s a constant test of faith in myself and a lesson in persistence.

I recently learned about Manson’s Law of Avoidance: ‘The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it’, – and it really resonated. A project like this forces you to be a humble beginner again and again. You have to make peace with fear and discomfort. It’s all ultimately an opportunity to grow.

h: Many of your pieces, like those inspired by Lotte Reiniger and Diana Vreeland, reflect a blend of classic and contemporary influences. Who are some of your biggest inspirations in the world of stop-motion and sculpture?

KS: I’ve always had a highly referential brain – I love to hunt, gather and combine. I’ll try to keep this concise because I can truly go on and on.

Within sculpture, I like to cast a wide net and look for things that feel surprising in the context of stop motion. Lately, I’ve been especially drawn to medieval carvings, Art Deco figurines, and ancient terracotta figures from around the world. I tend to favour artists somewhat rooted in anatomies, like Rodin and Bourdelle, but I also love abstract pieces like Calder’s Circus. I’m also hugely inspired by sculptors within the animation industry, and I believe the work of Kent Melton rivals any museum masterpiece.

Some of my other favourite artists include Egon Schiele, Al Hirschfeld, René Gruau and photographers such as Cecil Beaton and Man Ray. My favourite artist, though, is composer Stephen Sondheim. I love that he came from a place of obsessive, painstaking craft, drew from all of music history and broke the mould of Musical Theatre again and again across every narrative genre. That is exactly what I want to do in stop motion.

h: Given the growing interest in practical effects and tactile animation, where do you see stop-motion and puppet-based art heading in the next few years?

KS: In a world of fast fashion filmmaking churning out slop for the streaming trough, stop motion is couture – fine art in film. I think of stop motion as an inherently nostalgic medium at this point, like ballet. The technology is charmingly finite, and it will never again be the cutting edge of special effects, but the magic and appeal of real objects in real light are timeless, and the creative possibilities remain endless.

Stop motion is often seen as a ‘gamble’, but it’s not the medium that’s the risk – it’s the lack of fresh, contemporary storytelling and even art direction. People don’t want CG imitating the ‘stop motion look’ or endless remakes and sequels and remakes and sequels; they want the real thing. Even within stop motion, a lot of the past few decades have been driven by ‘more is more’-minded experiments with technology – printing out CG, plugging CG back into green screens, etc. I’m all for expanding the toolbox and improving the process, but at this point, we have seen time and again that over-polishing has a diminishing return. Contemporary audiences have been trained to assume everything on screen is artificial, so the trick moving forward is having the courage and taste to preserve enough rough edges for people to know what they’re seeing is real.

It’s been a rough year for the animation industry, and while stop motion is a perfect medium for independent work and personal expression, I desperately want it to thrive in giant, oozing spectacular feature films. The magic of creating life by hand is eternal, and audiences love it – they always will. What it needs is funding. Stop motion deserves to be recognised not just as a nostalgic novelty but as an essential, enduring art form in filmmaking.