I’ve really neglected keeping this site up-to-date over the past year or two, so it’s time for me to get back into the habit of posting the projects I’m working on. First up is Blathers, the museum director from Animal Crossing, which I sculpted as a birthday present for my sister last year. I was in the middle of another sculpting project, and was looking for something less complex that I could work through and finish quickly. Everyone was playing Animal Crossing at the time, and the character designs were exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.

I didn’t take many work-in-progress photos of this project, but the process was fairly straightforward. I started with a simple armature just to define the wings and feet, and built up two balls of tinfoil to block out the shape of the body and head. This was covered in NSP Chavant and the overall shape roughed out before refining the detail. In the graphics of the game, most of the details are flat textures, but I wanted to add more definition, so I raised the argyle pattern on his stomach and sculpted in the lines defining his face, cheeks, eyes and feathers. The book cover was made from a bent sheet of styrene, and the pages were sculpted from clay. With the sculpting complete, I cut off the wings to make it easier to mold, then molded the parts and cast copies in plastic. The Animal Crossing leaf logo base is a one-off piece made by bending sheets of styrene before gluing them together, so they retained a curve once bonded. This sits on top of a small round base so it looks like its floating.

Most of the painting on Blathers was done with the airbrush. Given Animal Crossing’s cartoony aesthetic, most parts are solid blocks of colour. The main challenge was figuring out the correct order of painting so that I could mask off sections without having to go back over previous work. The leaf has a nice gradient of colour that I’m quite pleased with. His pupils, the dots on his eyebrows (crest? Not sure what to call it!), and all the details in the book were painted freehand.

Thanks for reading,

Terry