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"