December 31 - Alien Quad Bod

All Aliens: [pointing up] The clawwwwwwwww!
Alien #1: The claw is our master.
Alien #2: The claw chooses who will go and who will stay.

This is the last hidden Jeff Hayes post I found in the backlog of posts I had set up to complete some day.

Thank you, Jeff -- not just for everything you taught, but for being the person you were, for inspiring not only me, but so many others to reach for loftier goals.  "What would Jeff do?" will stick in my vocabulary forever.  Miss you, friend.

Original text:

This Toy Story alien is one of the many uses of Jeffrey Hayes Quod-bod design.   Jeffrey Hayes does it again with a simple concept that you could use for a bajillion things (I've counted).  You could add attachment points anywhere on this simple 4 balloon structure, change up the colors and accessories to make a pudgy "whatever-you-want".   It kind of has that "Weeble Wobble", or chubby anime (chibi?) look. It works perfect for this toy story alien, just like something you would win out of a giant claw machine.

I'm bustin' you out of here!

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Other quad bod designs:

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All balloons by and inspired by the Jeffrey Hayes:

February 6 - Quad Fish

Would you like to swing on a star?
Carry moonbeams home in a jar?
And be better off than you are?
Or would you rather be a fish?

~ Frank Sinatra Swinging on a Star

The last of the Jeffrey Hayes inspired quad bod forms (for now) is this fish.

There is a luxury in building fish that is not found in building other creatures. Almost anything goes. Height, heft, fin size, colors, lips - it all works and speaks to the diversity of fish in nature.

The quad bod form works great for fish, it gives you very good attachment points for the side fins and easily created attachment points for the lips, dorsal and back fins.  Once again I just played around with the variety.

The biggest "problem" with these would be that the eyes are cartoonish and not actually on the side of the fish.  Good photos looking into the camera hide their fins, and side shots have them looking elsewhere.

He was just here ...

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Other posts with Quad-bod designs:


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February 4 - Quad Pig

Piglet: "How do you spell 'love'?"
Winnie the Pooh: "You don't spell it...you feel it."

~ A. A. Milne

As I mentioned earlier, with every design concept possible - I'm going to try and build a version of Purple Pig.  Here is my attempt using Jeffrey Hayes quad bod technique.

You can see that I had fun playing around with different ways to build this, and there were quite a few more made than are posted here.  The quad bod is such a simple and effective form that I would make them in the car while waiting at various son activities to be given away on the way home  The bottom photo was taken (with his brother, unpictured) into the dance studio to pick him up for a few of the ladies who work there to thank them for the amazing pictures of the TWIRL balloon art they used for their photo shoot last week..

I thought I was liking the split eyes, but now that I'm looking at the images, I think I prefer the basic quad bod form, it's cuter in it's simpleness.  Splitting the eyes also had the negative effect of needing to pull down the center and made everything tight and explode-y at times.

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February 3 - Quad Lyle

Magician, Comic, Daredevil & Balloon Twisting Genius!

~ Christopher Lyle 

Inspiration for this was taken from the Gru I posted yesterday - I wanted to make another Quad-bod-with-legs and found a suitable (perhaps literally) target in Christopher Lyle.

 Christopher has been on this blog both as artist and target (Chibicoro and baby as well as some others) and inhabits the persona of the occasional blog guest, Yellow Pig. I feel I should point out that I have a great deal of respect for the talents and good, if sometimes crude, humor of Christopher.  He frequently posts self-deprecating photo caption contests, so I know he won't take this in a bad way.

In much the same way as I would analyze building an elephant or a warthog, I had to reduce Mr. Lyle to an object to list the specifics of what makes him, him. Yellow suit, red tie, bald, XXL.

I built the "big ear" ones first, but didn't like the look so I created more manageable ears to attach to the side. I also like the thinner leg look as it makes the belly stand out more prominently. I always worry that I'm going to mess up a balloon by drawing faces, so I took a couple attempts on scraps and came up with a toothy mischievous grin that I think works well.

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February 2 - Gru

One big unicorn, strong and free, thought he was happy as he could be. Then three little kittens came around and turned his whole life upside down. They made him laugh, they made him cry. He never should have said goodbye. And now he knows he can never part from those three little kittens that changed his heart.

~ Gru (reading the book he wrote)
  Despicable Me

I was playing around with Jeffrey Hayes quad bod form while my son was at his dance class. I tend to have limited colors in my car spares balloon bag, but with a blush and a black it occurred to me to try Gru.

I started out with the traditional quad bod form, but this design really calls out for skinny toothpick legs.

The nose was the biggest struggle of the design, I tried a few attempts at drawing before giving up.  I think the puff inflated balloon works well, but there is not much control you have when placing it.  It was lined up pretty straight before drying, but then went a little wonky on me.

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February 1 - Quad Ewok

Coatee cha tu goo; (Yub nub!)
Coatee cha tu doo; (Yah wah!)
Coatee cha tu too; (Ya chaa!)
Allay loo ta nuv.

~ Ewok Song

I built these Ewok based on one of Jeffrey Hayes images for the quad bod form in my inspiration folder.

I did a bit of playing around with this one.  Originally I was attempting to keep to the true "quad" bod, but the chest area was looking a bit plain in comparison to Jeff's version.  Then I tried separating the quad into two twos (as I pondered in an earlier post) to make the head pose-able for the green one, but the form is lost a bit when the ends don't meet.

Jeff's version gives the Ewok a bit structure in the front for a cloak, and I ended up just copying what he did in the end.  It's a trio-bod maybe.  In hindsight, I made the head a bit large on the pig-trooper .. but I lost my source file so I couldn't fix it without remaking it completely ...

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Other posts with Mr. Hayes' designs:


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January 30 - Quad Sloth

They call me the sloth
Way down in the ghetto
Italian Spaghetti
Singing falsetto
Sleeping all day
Rip Van Winklin'
Spend my nights in bars
Glasses tinklin'

~ Phish The Sloth

Recently in the balloon forums someone asked to see versions of a sloth, and a nice variety have been posted - from realistic versions to Sid, the sloth from Ice Age. On the heels of making the koala, I figured I would try my hand at a sloth using Jeffrey Hayes quad bod technique.

One of the biggest complications with using this form is that it is not a very pose-able design, the body looks cute with squat against the head, but the head faces rigidly forward - come to think of it, it might be nice to try a two-duo quad bod to separate the two, hmmmmm.  I wanted to get a sloth in motion so I tried adding some simple legs. I'm not sure I like the result so I then made a "classic" version.

A balloon concept forces you to think in the simplest of terms when attempting an animal:
* What is a giraffe? Yellowish, long neck, brown spots.
* What is an elephant? Grey, trunk, enormous ears, tusks.
* What is a koala? Grey and white, big ears, prominent nose.
* What is a sloth? ... I went with "brown, prominent nose and eyes that stripe down the side of the face, three toes"

January 29 - Quad Koala

When my youngest son was taking me to the movie Moana, the projector broke - so we were forced to go to the movie Sing instead.  As I reluctantly entered the theater, I asked if he would rather see Rogue One again which was starting about the same time ...  I'm glad he didn't go for it, because I rather enjoyed the movie.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's fantastic, but I did find myself emotionally involved in many of the sub stories that were part of it.  As a father, I'm a bit of a sucker for "looking for his parent approval" stories, and both the Koala and Gorilla did a great job at tugging my heartstrings.

I took inspiration for this Quad Koala from balloon artist and face painter - Maria Behrendt, who I noticed has a Facebook profile koala that uses a quad body type form.  Thanks Maria!

I first tried keeping it simple with no arms (green base), but when I built one with larger ears I couldn't resist adding hands and a bit of eucalyptus.  I think it rounds out the belly nicely.

January 28 - Quad Penguin

Surf's Up is a animated mockumentary movie from 2007 about surfing penguins.  I saw it in the theater with my boys during the days when we would see just about anything animated.  I'm not ashamed to admit that I kind of enjoyed it - it was predictable, it was everything you thought it would be, it had an unlikable main character, but there were some pretty funny parts.  Chicken Joe is definitely a highlight.

This quad bod was another one that Jeffrey Hayes showed us in his webinar.

These simple concepts are fantastic, but it's evident to me that I didn't take very good notes in class. I didn't have a reference picture and once I started working out how I was going to stage the Purple shot, I noticed I should have made the bellies white so I had to build another.

I remember hearing in a Brian Potvin lecture at Bling Bling Jam how he builds everything three times before he calls it complete. I think this blog stands as evidence for the benefit in that. In the simplest form; a first build is an exploration, the second is a refinement and then the third is polish.

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Other posts with Mr. Hayes' designs:


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January 27 - Quad Chicken

Love me some schmoyoho - accent on the yo. Chicken attaAAAaAAaaa-aack. If you're not familiar with the channel, it's a fun one to get lost in.

This quad bod chicken was posted online by Jeffrey Hayes after his webinar where he introduced the concept.  So simple yet so effective, I've kept it in my inspiration folder anticipating using it at some point - I like how he makes the feet out of part of the flower base.

It was pointed out in a comment last night that these are very similar to Chibicoro, and I absolutely agree.  There are some significant differences though in my opinion, enough to be considered by me at least as a separate balloon concept (by me at least) - I do plan on reviewing the chibi concept in the future (Chibi link for reference sake).

... I don't think the question really was can we do this ...

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January 26 - Little Green Men

Buzz: This is an intergalactic emergency. I need to commandeer your vessel to Sector 12. Who's in charge here?
All Aliens: [pointing up] The clawwwwwwwww!
Alien #1: The claw is our master.
Alien #2: The claw chooses who will go and who will stay.

~ Toy Story

The LGM are a fun first representative from the next concept I will be exploring here. A little over a year ago, Jeffrey Hayes hosted a webinar where he showed us his design concept - Quad Bods. This was one of the designs he used as an example in that lesson.

I am a huge fan of Jeff's work, he has fantastic forward thinking ideas.  There are a few exercises I perform when working with balloons; if it's a design - I first try to build it as written, but then I ask myself a series of questions as I try to improve upon it.  One of the first of these questions is "What would Jeff do?"

Following the bouncy ball, I first built the purple one above, but when looked up some images to reference when drawing his eyes, I realized I got the colors wrong.  My second attempt had fatter ears, which wasn't quite right but I realize I should have turned them sideways for the picture.

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Other posts with Mr. Hayes' designs:


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