Students designs!

As you might already know, I'm taking my Year 10 Textiles students through the Plush It process. Here's some of the student's designs. Most are finishing off their drawings and are just starting to sew the body of their toys Renee
Natarsha

Kelsey

Katherine

Jasmine

Belinda

Amber

To all you teachers out there!

I'm currently putting together a Plush It teaching resource. I'm back at school on Tuesday and have got a Year 10 Textiles class to amuse. I'm making up a booklet which incorporates the principles discussed in the posts about making your own toys into something suitable and explicit enough for younger students to tackle. I have to run this past the artist's whose work I'm using as examples first, but if there is anyone who would like a copy, please leave your email in the comments. This is a strictly not for profit, educational only resource, for teaching young students. The text remains my property and the images remain the property of the artists. Any artist who does not want their images used, please let me know and I'll be happy to oblige. Images are used only as examples, from which students get an idea of how adult artists work

Exciting news kids! Pictoplasma, gods of intellectual burrowings into what a character is, are offering a lucky punter a chance at a residency, as part of the famous Character Walk which they hold each time they have a conference. Not much of a lead time (proposals in by the 26th of Jan) and works to be there by March but a seriously awesome opportunity

"Pictoplasma and DISK/club transmediale offer young and upcoming artists the opportunity to present their character driven work to a wide, international and interested audience.
As part of the official Character Walk, running from the 17th to the 21st of March 2009 and opening the world’s largest festival of contemporary character design and art, the renown project space General Public in the center of Berlin will serve as the perfect stage for the winning proposal.
The awarded artist will receive up to 10 days of accommodation in Berlin from the 11th to the 21st of March 2009, a grant of 500,- Euros to help realize the submitted proposal, all our support to set up the exhibition in the “General Public”, as well as free entry to all of the Pictoplasma Festival and Conference events.
We are open to your wildest, most daring, stylistically sure-footed character exhibition proposals, not limited to any media or style, ranging from video work, photography, performance, installation, painting, print, drawings or sculpture.
We expect to receive a detailed, written exhibition concept, some sketches as a first reference, a selection of the entrants previous work, an artist biography and all contact information via email until the 26th of January 2009. All material should be sent to
pictopia (at) pictoplasma (dot) com
A jury panel composed by former speakers of the Pictoplasma Conference, club transmediale and Pictoplasma will select the winning proposal and inform the future resident no later than the 5th of February. Should any questions need to be clarified, entrants are requested to be reachable via email AND phone during the first week of February.
In 2009, The Character Walk will once more guide numerous international festival attendees, producers and fans through over twenty selected locations in Berlin-Mitte, showcasing different positions of artists working in the genre of reduced figuration.
Artists exhibiting at previous Character Walks include:
Tim Biskup, Rinzen, Nanospore, Moki, Shoboshobo, Juju’s Delivery, Nathan Jurevicius, Gary Baseman, David Shrigley, Derrick Hodgson, Doma, Rob Reger, Jiacong Jay Yan, Genevieve Gauckler, Ian Stevenson, Steak Zombies, Friends With You and many more…
Miro Delija

The Plush It Template. You cut on the dotted lines and sew on the solid lines. If you make your own templates using Adobe Illustrator, you can easily create an instant seam allowance line using the Object/Offset path command. I used Round and 20pt as my settings

Sewing can be as simple or as complex a procedure as you like. A really basic kind of plush is what's called a pillow doll. Much the same way as the pillow you sleep on was created, you get two pieces of fabric (in the case of a pillow, two rectangles) the same size and shape. You then pin those two pieces of fabric together so they are facing in.

This is Frocoli's design when it was sketched out on two pieces of fake fur. Note that the two pieces of fur have the furry sides facing inside and the woven backing of the fur is on the outside. This is a more advanced form of starting your design, in that he's sketched his design freehand on the fabric.

What does that mean?

This means that fabric usually has a right side and a backing. Fake furs the easiest example to use. The furry side is the right side, the side that should be facing in. So once you've cut out your two pieces of fake fur in the same shape, you put the two furry sides together so they are touching and then pin around the outside. this is because once you are finished sewing your piece, you are going to turn out the piece. In other words, turn it inside out. this will mean that the stitches you used to create the piece will be on the inside of the piece, and the viewer won't be able to see them.

Hopefully you can see here that my pins for Decomposing Dave are a few centimetres in from the edge. That's where I sewed my seam. That's a seam allowance of fabric

Seam allowance. When I, and most of the artists were sewing their pieces for the Plush It Show, we cut out two of the template shapes. As we intend to sew along the outline of the template, we leave what's called a seam allowance around the edge of our shapes when cutting it out. what this means is that you can either draw about a 1cm (or more) larger outline of the template onto the fabric and cut along this larger shape, or you cut out your shape leaving a gap between where you cut and the outline. You DO NOT cut on the outline. You need a gap or seam allowance between where you're going to sew (seam) and the edge of the fabric.

So now what? Well now you sew. There's lots of different ways to do this. The simplest way is to do it by hand, with a needle and a thread and just do a straight stitch. The reasons why this can be a useful place to start is you don't need any technology (sewing machines etc) so there's low outlay of funds for you. I also personally find that my hand stitched creations are much 'truer' to the template or drawing I created (they turn out looking much closer to the original shape). Unless you're skilled at using sewing machines, it's much harder to make all the tiny little compensations and changes you do as you hand sew with a sewing machine. But for sheer time saving and efficiency, you can't beat a sewing machine, especially when you find out just how much time you're going to need sewing a piece and how little money plush is sold for!

If you have never sewn before and need help, sewing.org seems to be a good place to look for basic instructions. It's usually something that someone in your family will know how to do, so try them! I use a very basic straight stitch, which is simply the kind of 'over and under' stitch kids are often taught when very young. Using double thread (you thread your cotton through the needle and bring both ends together and knot them = a doubling up of your thread) tends to make your pieces stronger, as does making smaller stitches. You only have to look at the tiny stitches made in commercial plush to see the more stitches equals stronger construction.

Now you have two choices, to sew completely around the whole shape, or to leave a gap. I personally like to sew around the whole piece. I find again, that the shape stays truer. the problem you will note, if you actually do this, is that you now have a shape that is sewn up completely, wrong side out, and now way to turn it inside out.

At this point I usually cut a slit in one side of the piece. This is usually where the mouth will be, or some other kind of detail. In my Gimp Bunnies, it's actually in the back of the piece, there's a little bunny tail sticking out the back of all that vinyl. That was you get a seamless finish to the piece, there's no obvious closing seams.

If you leave a gap in your seam (you stop before sewing the complete outline of the piece) then you can easily turn it inside out, you have a nice handy hole in your seam to do that. But once you've turned the piece inside out and filled it with stuffing of some sort, you'll have to close this.

The decision as to which way to go is really an aesthetic thing. Shawnimals uses his closing seams as a focus in his work

You can see the little stitches down the bottom of this little Pocket Dollop? If you use a blanket stitch to close your piece up (more about that in a minute) then you declare to all and everyone that this piece is handmade, that the artist( himself in this case), made these stitches and completed this piece. It's all part of that handmade aesthetic. To be blunt, few plush makers can rival the sophistication of what's being produced commerically, so why try? There is a charm and appeal that handmade has, that no commerical product can rival, so by using a stitch like this, you're out and proud about your handmade-ness.

Or, if you make more complicated pieces and don't want to 'clutter' the piece with an obvious seam, use a blind stitch. Off to sewing.org again if you don't know what one of those is!

So, stuffing!

Stuffing is simply the materials you use to fill your plush. Plush is in a lot of ways like a 'stuffed drawing'. You start out with flat surfaces, you attach them to each other, but it's not until you begin stuffing the piece, does it become 3-D. This can be part of the difficulties of making plush. Unlike vinyl, where you can start with wax, clay, or some other modelling material, and you're able to see the form as it develops, sewing is a little less easy to control. each time you turn a piece inside out and stuff it, you get to see if it all actually worked! Sometimes even shapes that look like they should work and are not too different from things that you've made before successfully just look bad when they're stuffed. Isn't that fun!

The types of materials you can use are varied. Poly fill, a spun polyester (i think?) filament that looks a lot like clumps of wool and can be found in most craft shops is often used. Eco fill is being touted a lot in the community, it's not available where I am, so I'm pretty ignorant about it. it you want that beanie type fill, like Beanie Babies have, you can buy small plastic beads that are used to fill toys from bear making suppliers. Some people use strips of old fabric, cotton wool. Basically it's something softish to be stuffed inside your toy.

The way you stuff toys is either a simple of difficult task, depending on your own personal prejudices. I have seen a lot of bear artists who have quite specific ways of stuffing toys, to get more subtleties out of their forms. There are even tools to help you stuff. My advice is this, stuff the piece, don't use scissors to help as they tend to pierce the fabric and play around with the fill. little fine parts of a piece, like fingers for instance, often have to be stuffed first, they will be too difficult to stuff once you've got most of the body sorted. rolling up small balls of poly fill and setting them into the fingers or whatever will often make sure they are stuffed properly. You have to also be a little careful about overstuffing a piece. lumpy toys with uneven surfaces because they have had stuffing shoved into them until bursting point isn't pretty. but you can use this technique to create form if you like. the template at the beginning of this post comes out pretty flat, the usual softly rounded surface you get with most pillow dolls. If you wad up some fill and slide it to the center of the face of the template and then stuff it quite hard, you can create a pointy nose type form in the face. Experiment, see what works for you.

Stuffing don'ts.

Don't stuff til straining point and split your seams

No lumpy toys ( I hate that!)

Don't under stuff. Floppy limbs are good if they are part of a design, but not because you didn't stuff it properly

Watch your stuffing around any sharp angles in the design. If you have arms that come out of the body on say a 45 degree angle, you'll often get some creasing in your toy around this joint. stuffing fairly hard around here will give your piece a more smooth Designer Vinyl look to it

Stuffing Advice

Some fabrics have a bit of stretch in them and are much better for making plush. they stretch with the fill and make your piece look a lot smoother and more appealing. Shawnimals and Ugly Dolls tend to use fabrics like polar fleece. It's soft, it's knitted (knits tend to take forms a lot better than woven fabrics) and has a little stretch to it. Fake fur has a bit of stretch, as do lycras, stretch vinyl etc. Too much stretch (polyester lycra is often too stretchy for plush) can totally distort and ruin your form.

Finishing off your form

As I said beforehand, you either make an obvious closing seam, like the Pocket Dollops, using a blanket stitch or an overhand stitch or you use a blind stitch to close the seam so it looks like there was no closing seam there. Or you hide your closing seams like I do, behind the mouths or whatever else you sew on top of your piece!

Well, that's the basics. But right now, you'll only have a blank shape, much like a blank Munny or Qee. What do you do now with it? Well, next post will be about how to create the character you designed on the piece using a range of strategies...

So you've got your body drawn, designed, sewn up and ready to finish. Now we get to the knitty gritty's. Bodies with pulled seams and puckers, unsightly bulges etc are going to detract from your work, so getting a good base form sorted is important. But, it is the next part of the plush that usually makes a difference when it comes to plush.

You're going to add the parts of the piece which make up the character: the eyes, nose, mouth, tail, horns, prehensile teeth, antenna, prolapsed colon...whatever. You've worked this out on paper already, and are confident that your character is fabulous....so now's the time to see if you were actually correct.

Jill Penney's Fimo models of her pieces for Plush It

The translation from 2-d to 3-d is a tricky one. Interestingly, plush maestro Jill Penney created some small Fimo models of her Plush It Designs before making the finished product, which is a labour intensive process, but makes a lot of sense. 2-D and 3-D sometimes seem like completely different visual languages, what is very successful in one form, doesn't always work out that well in the other. Which is why my illustrations suck and some people have the most beautiful tags, websites and promo material for their plush, but the actual object is a little meh.

Firstly: materials

Eyes: Eyes can be made from buttons (I use buttons which I embellish with dimensional paint). They can be shank buttons (on the underside of the button is a little loop of plastic with which you sew it to the piece. Benefit: you don't see button holes on the final piece. Drawback, on smooth fabrics like cotton they can flop around a bit as they don't sit flush to the fabric, or buttons with holes in them (dunno what the proper name is). Each needs to be secured pretty tightly to the piece, as this is often the thing that will come off, in transit to the gallery, in the customers hand when they buy it! I tend to use double thread and just try to sew it as strongly and as tightly as possible....and still have eyes that come loose and fall off, so I'm not the greatest advisor when it comes to this.

My piece, Floral Ecstacy. As you can see, you can find some interesting buttons which make for some out of the box kind of eyes!

Beautifully embroidered sugar skull plush by the multi-talented Geek Freeks

You can embroider your eyes on. This means using stitches to create the illusions of eyes. If you're very proficient at embroidery, you can embroider shapes and colours, much as if you were drawing on the fabric, or, more simply, you can use an embroidery stitch on the outside of some fabric which you've cut in the shape of your eyes

Nerderella's lovely piece for Plush It. If drawing's your thing, using felt can be a useful way to translate your drawing of eyes etc more truly, as it remains flat and 2-D like your sketch

You can cut out felt shapes and stick them on, or use neoprene. Use a pretty strong glue, stuff like hot glue guns and aquadhere can actually loose their bond in hot climates like mine (I live in the tropics...sigh). Araldite is often pretty tough.

Shawnimals Pocket Pork with safety eyes (I think!)

Ugly Doll OX

You can use safety eyes. A must if making plush for small children. All of the above strategies, except for the embroidered one are possible choking risks for small children. Buttons, definitely, everything else, not so much. Safety eyes are a plastic domed eye which has a long shank on the back which you feed through a small hole in your plush. they are attached very securely by a washer which you push on the shank from the inside of the turned out plush. Best to do this before putting the stuffing in. they are much more difficult for little fingers to remove and then put in their mouths, so keep this in mind when thinking of your prospective audience. Shawnimals and Ugly Dolls really have cross market appeal, they are beloved by the very small and the not so small, so Shawnimals tends to use safety eyes in his pieces (I think from looking at them) and Ugly Dolls tends to embroider theirs on.

John Knox's piece for Plush It

You can also use materials like t-shirt transfer paper which is how I think John Know of Hello Brute does his. This way, if you want your plush to ressemble very closely your digital designs, you can actually print out your faces with an inkjet printer and heat seal them to your fabric. Be careful about doing this with synthetic and stretch material. His My Pal Sooky La-La show was incredibly successful plush wise and the pieces were fairly simple, but coupled with his incredible faces which he created for each one, made a range of plush pieces that had a lot of the clean graphic and endearing qualities of his other designs.

This was a collaborative piece that Marita Albers and I did. Being a painter, she painted up some beautiful faces on canvas and then I stitched them to the body I'd made. It works best if you use some pretty felxible painting surface (canvas was maybe a little stiff) and sew the pieces (often an over stitch, a stitch you can see on the outside of the piece, before they are stuffed)

So here's a variety of approaches that are fairly do-able for most people. You can get buttons, safety eyes, felt and canvas from most craft shops and inkjet transfer paper can be bought from most printing consumable outlets. There's some interesting stuff out there as well, the imitates the complex process of dye sublimation (ink is impreganted into a synthetic fabric surface) that's even better than inkjet transfer paper, but I haven't been able to get hold of any. Next we'll look at some other more complex ways of putting together a character

plush making process: characterisation

So what exactly are you going to draw? Well I guess the overarching title of this industry is what you're looking for: Character Design. You are trying to create character. Loosely defined as one of the three elements of what makes us up as people (character, temperament and personality), character is really important obviously in Designer Plush. You're not usually making toys for small children, most people who buy Designer Plush are adults/teens. So what makes then pick your piece up rather than the multitude of others out there? Things like textures and materials can obviously help, things that feel nice will often seduce people, as will pleasing colours (one of the reasons I always find my plush sells better via bricks and mortar rather than online) but character is primary.


If someone relates to the character, it pushes down on their 'cute' nerve and makes them respond to it, if the piece and buyer are able to strike up some kind of chord, then sales and success are more likely to happen. Interestingly character seems to be conveyed loosely in two different ways



Minimalism


The Japanese are masters of character design. They have companies like Sanrio and San-X who specialise purely in character design. A little different than the traditional character design process for products in the West, where graphic designer for say, Kellogs, design a character like Tony the Tiger and Kellogs retain the right to that character. In Japan many characters, like Hello Kitty obviously, are licensed to a variety of producers of goods to be placed on their products. So Sanrio isn't in the business of making the toilet paper, condoms, toasters, or vibrators that sport Kitty's image (though they do produce some goods I think), they supplement this with licencing Kitty's image to these producers to include on their products to make them more appealing and sell more. Takashi Murakami, god of Superflat Art estimated that 85% of Japanese people owned some sort of character branded goods, so it's obviously a strategy that works.


Minimalism in character design


"Hello Kitty, as well as her family and friends, is generally depicted without a mouth, especially in merchandise. Her current designer says that she should have one because without, she lacks emotion. The official position of Sanrio is that she speaks from the heart, having no need of any particular language [citation needed]. Hello Kitty was depicted as having a mouth in a segment in the series Sanrio World of Animation. However, it has been said that Hello Kitty does have a mouth, but it is not drawn, as the creators wanted Hello Kitty's emotions to be interpreted by the viewer."


Ugly Dolls, the incredibly successful Designer Plush from the US have a similar strategy. Not quite as minimal as Hello Kitty, they still keep the facial expressions in their plush to a minimum (though not so much in other character designs)


What are the Ugly Dolls expressions? Are the sad, happy, angry, wistful, melancholy, indecisive? Whilst some have tongues hanging out, perhaps giving you some sort of clue as to what they're thinking :) it's actually up to you to decide. Sanrio has discussed how the 'blankness' of some characters can be an advantage, it gives you a kind of mental sewing needle, where your brain can stitch on the expression appropriate to your current mood onto the toy and instantly feel it is in tune with what you are thinking and feeling.




Maximalism!


Okay this isn't really the right word for it, but when you make it very clear what the expression of the piece is, let's go with Overt Characterisation for the moment. This is where you deliberately try to convey to the viewer what the character is feeling.



This is Bunny Poo by the fabulous Nerderella. The piece is called Screaming Bunny, just in case you didn't get that by looking at him! I admit this is the kind of character design I prefer. I frequently feel like a Screaming Bunny, so i instantly feel approval for this design. If I only was as cute as that when I was stressed! So if this is the kind of design you choose to make, then you will be either hitting or missing with your viewer. If they don't respond to cute screaming little bunnies, then your design will be disregarded. But it's a pretty safe risk to take, with the prevalence of sado-cute media like South Park, Drawn Together etc, we, as a society, are pretty drawn to the wonderful ambivalence of the cutely insane.


So? How do you achieve either kind of characterisation in your work?



It's a little like any kind of artform, you have to get into the language of character. This beautiful exercise by the wonderful Greg Abbot is a great one to look purely at characterisation. I get kids in my Cartooning class to do stuff similar. The most minimal of shapes and just trying different faces and ways to convey expression. As a beginning exercise, this is great way to discover your style and type of character (if you don't already know)

Researching other people's work is always one way of going about it as well. Artists over the centuries have always talked about how their work came about from being influenced by those before them. Even Picasso, icon of Modernist "originality" and Artist as Hero admitted that Cezanne (and African mask making) was a huge influence on his work. Some people like and some people hate this idea. It depends how hung up on the whole "my work is a completely original and unique display of my inherent wonderfulness" thing you are. Me personally, there's nothing new under the sun, we're all just trying to recombine and mutate things as best we can.


But if you're okay with it, look at other artists work. Flickr, Mojizu, Pictoplasma are all excellent sources of character design from across the globe. Who do you like/dislike and why? How does the person who you do like create his characters? Can you reverse engineer one? This is legitimate practice for the development of style, but not a legitimate means of making characters and selling them. There seems to be a disturbing amount of plush on Etsy and Deviant Art that are direct knockoffs of Ugly Dolls, Shawnimals etc work. These people aren't making millions (yet) and it's not fair to rip off other people's work. It's also illegal, so y'know, play nice.


The important thing though is to distinguish yourself. There's a hell of a lot of plush and character design creators out there. if your stuff is derivative or an outright copy, why will people look at your stuff rather than anyone else's? The sad thing is there are so many Wee Ninja knockoffs out there, as everyone has had the bright idea to rip off someone else's design, that your rip off is out there in a sea of counterfeits. Go for your own ideas and put them out there and see if they are able to succeed in getting noticed.



So you've researched, developed a language of character design that you like, now what? Well Virginia, it's now time to sew....

Plush Making process: Drawing!

Drawing!

A weird place to start perhaps, but most sculptors, plush makers, 3-D object creators, at some point in their development of their skills, start with a drawing. Beautiful full realised sketches like Henry Moore's (famous UK sculptor if you don't know) or just a quick scribble, it's usually a means to get the basics down on paper, to be sure what you're going to make has the right proportions, shape, composition etc.

I've included here a selection of the drawings from the Plush It Show.

This is a drawing by Geek Freeks. It's the kind of drawing I tend to do (though a lot nicer drawn here!). It's worked out what's going where. Proportions (how big is the heart, the nose, the eyes etc) are all sorted out here in the sketch, so in theory, if you follow these proportions when making the plush, all will be good. Importantly though, plush/3-D is not the same as a drawing, and sometimes the translation, even if scrupulously followed from the original sketch, is just not right. That means, of course, going back to the drawing board!


Cuddly Rigor Mortis's sketch for her Plush It piece. You can see that she's suggested materials to herself to use, colours etc. The trial of a few ideas is a great one, and one I use a lot myself, you can see quickly, what's going to work and what's not, without having to make each and every idea.

Robyn Fabsits completed design for her piece for Plush It. This can be useful as you see pretty much exactly what it's going to look like and evaluate it before you make it. I never do this of course, because I'm too impatient!

So these are my drawings. I did page after page of different proposals initially, just to get the ideas going, see what would come out of the ol creative faculties. Then I decided on one for Decomposing Dave. As always, the final product differed a bit from the drawing. Worms coming out the side of the head was great in the drawing, not so good on the final product


Writing instructions for yourself when making complex plush. Violet Pie had a very complex piece. It included dyeing the piece using Kool Aid, needle felting the face, using taxidermy eyes, so it's important then to give yourself some instructions to follow. It can be great when the ideas are flowing, you can see the piece and how it will look perfectly in your head, but when you come to make it, sometimes it gets a little more confusing dammit!

Design by Frocoli

Using different coloured pens can also help, draw your attention to parts of the design, or go over some of your initial lines which you've decided to change.

Michal Wright-Ward's process was interesting. She was working from the template which we all worked from, but used tissue paper/drafting film to draw her design over the design, so that she could both look at her design, free of the template to evaluate it, or put it back over the piece to match it to the template

And Jill Penney. Largely considered to be some kind of maestro in plush, here's her process below. If you find it a little difficult to read the text says

"The spiders started as little tiny sketches in the corner of my sketchbook. I messed around with them a little on paper and then added colour"