Bunny Gif

So top down game art was so difficult that after I did a semi good job on the character walk for the boyfriend I decided to make this before bedtime! Enjoy! hhaahahaa

 

Jurassic World Inspired Indominus Rex

It's been a while since I updated my blog, been drafting a lot but not had time to properly structure one to post. This is just a quick post, planning to prepare a better photoshoot of this little guy but just couldn't resist to share NOW! Basically me and my partner went and watched an 11pm screening the very night of Jurassic World came out last Thursday! And we totally loved it!!! I guess part of the reason for how much we loved it was because of how nostalgic it is for both of us having seen it when we were kids. It totally remind me of the kid inside of my old self right now. Made me realised how cool my dad was to have taken the whole family to see the best movies back in the days.  : ) I think I was very lucky to be old enough to watch it in 1993 and remember what I saw and felt after we came out of the cinema naturally thinking there would be a dinosaur around the corner!  ha ha!

For a long time I am either working on some new patterns to take me closer to having an etsy shop or making something for a friend. But the whole toy making hobby began just because I love toys and always thought it would be cool to make them. Not really a reason behind it. So I decided to make something for me for a change! And just started making the Idominus Rex from the film, have to say still a bigger fan of Raptors and T-Rex but he turns out better than I envisioned!! So here is my late night test shoot.

P.S I already made a dinosaur for a friend before and he's here!

 

 

 

Custom doll : Laura Jayne

Hello! So here is a second doll ordered by a friend for his girlfriend as a birthday present. A doll that I feel that's possibly the best thing I have ever made! Here she is in a silly gif that I didn't get all the right angles! But it looks kinda cool, not as good as one of my favourite crafter Nekranea though.

Weeeeee~~~

Brief
So I was given three photos from Adam, for the dress he wanted Laura Jayne to be wearing, the hair she should have and obviously a close up of what she looks like. So I made a cute pencil sketch concept to get Adam's to approve it first. The challenge for making any a doll for Laura is to be able to capture the essence of her even though I haven't met her yet at the point of designing. I have made many toys of friends before but I tend to exaggerate what stands out about them to make the toy remind me of that person more. So it is only Adam who would know if the design works or not! Luckily he was pretty happy with it, I certainly feel happy with it myself!

Hair

One of the key feature was her tidy neat fringe with the dip-dyed hair. It was perhaps one of the biggest headache I had. It required a bit more experimenting than I have time for. So in the end I went for felting two colours together instead of going through bleaching or dying any fibres. I think it worked quite well and the overall result is of 99% satisfaction for my standard! I am leaving 1% for improvement - always!!!! I think I must have done three bunches of these strands of hair of what you see in this image below or maybe I lost count! The actual fringe was  about 2 layers of work and then lots of sculpting around the front to make it sort of curved in nicely.

HAIRRRR~!

Face

For every doll or toy I made, the face is always something I enjoy making the most, I guess it's like when you bring life and personality to it. I also think if everything else is good but the face is bad, it ruins the whole thing. Through studying the photos I noticed Laura has brown eyes with some golden sparkles in them. I was really insisted in searching for this pair of perfect beads that are brown with golden glitter in them. I also wanted to add this necklace she was wearing in the picture because small details really make a doll extra special. Apart from these little things, I also tried out if having giving her proper lips would work however in the end I felt a basic smile works best for her. 

Some of my practicing lips.

Wasn't keen on this!

Much more sweet!

Which shades to pick hmm~!

The dress
Then there was the polka dot dress! It didn't occur to me that polka dot fabric wasn't easy to find! I think I visited about six different craft/fabric store to hunt down this lovely indian hand printed fabric. I did rush at first and purchased this cheaper version here but I felt the dots were too large for a tiny little doll. However it was good to use as a test dress. 

Rubbish looking dress here

And look how happy she is with the final dress!

I just love this cute necklace I made with a gold plated chain and of course the perfect beads for her eyes!

Packaging
The fun part but easily time consuming also!

1) Get the right box. 
2) Pick the correct colours to match the theme.
3) Get the right paper to print the relevant things. 
4) Decision - decorate the box or not?

Although time consuming yet it is such an key stage to present the doll in the best possble way. However I seem to be always running out of time and last time I messed up one box so this time I was careful to only stick the picture on the inside just incase I change my mind about it. Haha!

So here she is ready to go - isn't it perfect!

She is so adorable that it wasn't easy to let her go!!

Cool box from paperchase!

#002 Bum Tag!!

Finally I hope Laura enjoy her as much as I enjoyed making her and hope she had a very special Birthday!

And... here is a bonus underwear shot which I find quite funny:P haha!

Custom Knitted Doll - Joan

Happy New Year! May I use my first blog post in 2015 to introduce my first custom personalised doll for a friend's wife! It was a christmas present. So I kind of rushed everything a little bit towards the end but overall I am 99% happy with the result! The lucky lady Joan was thrilled how many likes she got on facebook over her very own doll. So I am happy that she is happy:)

Here is a little illustration I did for her.

I based this whole doll on this one I posted about here. Which has a crocheted body with a hand sewn dress. But this time I wanted the hair to be sculpted with merino wool so I could get the hair to look even more realistic than last time. I also wanted to finally try shrink plastic on the glasses.

A lot of the time if you are just making something for yourself you can go back and forth on projects because you don't have a deadline however when you do have one, you start to realise how some stages actually does take a lot longer than you think. However since it is such a special gift, I really wanted to nail things like hair colour and skin tone. In the end I tried three different shades for the skin, baked six pairs of failed glasses, crocheted an extra pair of legs and had to do the dress entirely by hand! The machine was too heavy handed on the intricate materials I had to use.

However despite the challenges I had, she was beautifully blossomed - how cheesy is this sentence!

Here is a close up of her with her cool glasses.

My proud sculpted hair with a cute ribbon.

I love random laying down shots.

Bum shot!! This is just show the cute signature of course!

Here she is ready to go~ she looks happy!

Bye Joan Lini! You will be missed!

Hopefully the next doll would come along soon!!! :) Wish you a happy and healthy 2015!!!

Fly Giant Moggy - Digital Painting

Fly Giant Moggy

This is probably my first proper digital painting I have done since I bought my cintiq13HD, I have been practising a bit every now and then but I never seem to force myself to finish something properly. The goal of this was so I have something interesting on my boring wall in the living room. I really enjoy drawing strange giant flying things, it seems to be something I have always done, round fat and huge! So this painting was born!!! I had some interesting feedback from family and friends, one of my dad's was you should have more than seven seagulls because it's bad luck so there is now more and it's even numbers!! I feel I should have added more detail on the cat, maybe some pattern or something but I ran out of time before I had to submit it to my printer but overall it feels complete so I'm keeping it as it is!!!

Enjoy!!

Knitted Toy - Haslini!

It's been a while that I have posted anything again. But I would like to backtrack this piece that I made for a very special lady who has sacrificed a lot of her own time to teach me things at work as well as life. She is also a very important lady at work that everyone respects. It was meant to be a thank you and good bye gift. However I was lucky enough to be staying on in the end! But I gave her the toy anyway! And she loved it! It is always so lovely to see that the person loves it so much that they held it next to their face!

Here is the little toy that I designed based on her with a top I have seen her wearing a lot which I turned into a dress!

So Haslini was born!

This is what she looked like when she was given away!

Happy New Year!

So hello, I wish everyone is going to have a successful, happy and healthy year ahead. I started my new job just before Christmas. Therefore I been quite busy to post another blog about some more felted presents I made for friends and family. One of them is very special, it's based on a design by my boyfriend's uber talented brother. He's been doodling a lot and you can see some on his band's page here. So I thought it would be cool to visualize his work into crafted pieces.

I can't find the original design but this is one of them that's similar!

The original design was a line drawing from the front of this little man so it didn't have information behind his sad little face so I decided it was appropriate for me to add something slightly inappropriate, it just turned out that way, don't ask why, its just funny! hehe!!

Looking innocent..

oh dear!

The other piece I did was a little 10cm tall rabbit for my friend and I just wanted to include her favorite colour in. I only managed to find blue although she likes pale turquoise but I think she turns out very lovely too but I need to work on expressions  more because she looks a little sad...

I also wasn't happy with her long legs, it made her looks older and thin, it would be cuter if she had stumpy chunky legs but sometimes you just go with the flow! And it seems beady button eyes would be much sharper for her face! Anyhow will be felting more! Watch this space!

FELTED CHRISTMASSY THINGS

Ho Ho Ho!

So I finally feel more relaxed after my new job is settled so I finally feel like updating my blog! So here is what I been busy doing for some friends, I wish I can make a lot more if I had time as but they can easily take up to 8 hours each but I think I still managed to make quite a proud collection for this year, you can never help your friends and family enough in your life so if you didn't receive one this year don't hate me! It's only because there's only so much time after work for me!!

So normally I start all my designs with a sketch but they don't always translate well to 3D and I always kind of just work it out as I sculpt it. So actually some didn't turn out as interesting as I had hoped so then I would just improvise and go crazy! But that can be quite fun! Ha!

1. Rex

He is about 10cm tall and kind of based on a Raptor dinosaur, not one of the things I draw on a regular basis so the challenge was making it my style as well as has to resemble a dinosaur! So I decided to go for a classic lime green and made sure I got a tail on his back, big teeth and claws! Would have liked to have him with his jaw open but the sketches didn't work well. After a about 10 drawings my boyfriend also helped me do about two and I liked the way he drew the teeth and the shapes I had in my sketch, so I went for it and ended up going to bed at 2am! But you know he looks pretty cute! Except everyone thinks the nostrils are eyes! Eyes on a dinosaur is on the side of their heads of course!

Little Rex should be in Montreal with my friend Ric now, good luck!:)

This is a side view with it's tail wrapping round him.

Looks like a creepy man from front ha!

2. Little Yifan Hood

She is pretty small, I think about 7cm tall, just like my friend Yifan in person, a very tiny girl! Hehe but very talented indeed. The reason I made her into little red riding hood was because it was a shame we didn't bother with Halloween this year when she had her costume ready so here it is! Halloween was a stressful time for me this year but she was there to listen and support me , so thank you Yifan and hope you have a nice deserving break back home!

Here is Yifan's work by the way!

I was most pleased when I put them in these plastic sleeve, it makes them look precious hehe!

3. Dan

Dan has been a very good team mate for a few projects we worked together on and I have a habit of doodling a graphic version of him a lot so I wanted to transform that through felting , the beard didn't come out as well as I had hoped but since it looks quite sweet I felt he would appreciate it just as much. Look at them together here hehe!

 

4.  Mr Chazman

Charlie has been an amazing friend and mentor for the very big part of my career and he is one of my favorite people to work with! People have always made Charlie into different things which were all ACE so I decided it would be interesting to make a felted version too. I am very pleased with how it turned out, I wonder if it brought a tear to his eye haha! The biggest challenge was not making a rig to begin with in its core so it was a little tricky to attach the head but I think the stabbings were quite clean so it's pretty neat. I also liked my colour scheme very much!

Here is Charlie's work as well.

5. Zoo Christmas Baubles!

Finally I wanted to make these for my bosses at my last job as they have been very very kind to me for the last five and half years, plus it's Christmas!! My aim was to make some animals and my boyfriend said I have to have elephant and giraffe as that's what make a zoo a zoo! 

But in the end I got bored and added things like wings and a Christmas hat. It just felt they needed something extra! You would have never guessed that the weird creature was meant to be giraffe to begin with haha!! The elephant took the longest, again not drawn elephant an awful lot so it took a long time to look cute and getting the proportions right! The giraffe probably turned out to have the most personality, anything weird is Awesome right!

Close ups are always cute!

And here is one ready to go!

I am actually desperately need to work on three more pieces before Christmas! Wish me luck, here is a snippet of one work in progress! Good Luck to me!

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!