HOW to make a wayang kulit?

A small family business with specialty in making wayang kulit, shadow puppers in leather like you see in my cave.Below are three artists who work delicately and attentively on each and every wayang/puppet. Cutting the leather into character shapes. Carving it. Drawing it. Coloring it. They use water-buffalo skin for all their puppets because it's durable and thicker than other skins. For the skeletons and sticks to move arms while playing characters in puppet show, they utilize buffalo's horns.

Water buffalos are used to plow rice fields there, to get the terrain ready before farmers plant rice seeds in the soil. I was impressed by the natural materials they use and how they create these pieces of Arts. puppet show (shadow or not) is still presently popular in Indonesia as one of the continuing oral traditions of telling stories from one generation to another. Because of Indonesia's historical background when it was once kingdoms (Majapahit and Sriwijaya), there's strong influence of Indian/Hinduisme in many traditional stories like: Ramayana and Mahabrata for examples. These puppets represent different characters of these two legendary stories.

Shadow puppet show is done usually behind a white screen, where a Dalang (story teller) sits behind and below the screen. The room needs to be like in a theater where you will only see the silhouetes or shadows of these different characters.

A dalang will tell a story and play different characters with its different voice, with Gamelan, Javanese traditional orchestra, as the background music. Or to emphaize certains scenes or movements, a specific noise will be used. It's impressive to see these puppets shows in person.