February 7 - 12 Petal Flower

The strangest thought came to me on this morning
As I awake to greet the coming dawn
The sun was hardly peaking through the garden
It felt that with everything I was one

Then I wished that I could come back as a flower

~ Stevie Wonder Come Back As A Flower

I was trying to find a good balloon to make as thanks to our office manager at work. I've tried to casually ask for a favorite animal or movie or something to no avail, so I figured flowers would be a safe choice.

This flower is one of Vyacheslav Andrienko's designs (link). Typical flowers are 6 or 7 petals, but Vyacheslav uses a method were you can somewhat reliably get 12 petals in a nice curved form.

It's a good technique but certainly requires some practice, when using that many flower petals cramped so closely together, they need to not only be the perfectly same size - but also have the same air pressure within the bubbles, or things start looking off.   I got close on a couple, but Vyacheslav was able to casually make them in the course of the video so I know it's possible. A couple of mine became 10 petal flowers...

Our fur baby was aggressively wanting attention, but not in a "take my picture" way.  This is the only shot where he is in focus.

Baby's breath?  No ... he use a pump.

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Other posts with Vyacheslav's designs:
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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 5 - Superbowl Babies

We're not here to start no trouble.
We're just here to do the Super Bowl Shuffle.

~ Chicago Bears

Juan Gonzales has posted a good number of variations using his baby head recently, including these Superbowl babies.

These baby heads are probably one of the most used prints I have, even though he face is not very complicated and could probably easily be drawn, there is a convenience to having a good print face that can't be overlooked.  Come to think of it - it's a bit weird, almost like a plain balloon would have too much potential, yet with these prints you know what they are going to be.

Thank you to Ella Grimshaw for sharing her usage of Juan's design, it was her post that actually prompted me to build these.

I see you've each brought your own ball ...

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Other posts with Juan's 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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Other posts with Quad-bod designs:


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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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Other posts with Quad-bod designs:


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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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Other posts with Quad-bod designs:


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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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