Ok, I guess it’s time to get back into my story…

The next step for me in balloon twisting was to test various techniques and watch through videos and different characters created by balloon artists. This happened about within a month from the start. One character, created by Michael Floyd, was the Genie:

Genie – Balloon ! Win ! Fail ! #30: http://youtu.be/_yjohuH7xVs

This was the one I thought I should test. This was also the first a little bit more advanced balloon character I created without detailed step-by-step instructions:

I must admit that I was pretty happy with the result – taking into account, that I really hadn’t done more than a couple of slightly more advanced characters before this… It’s not exactly identical to the one on the video, but I was just trying to capture the spirit of the Genie.

I have never been especially artistic or creative person, but this seemed to be really enjoyable, inexpensive (at least I thought so at this point… 😉 ) and not very space-consuming (ok, you need to pop your balloons every once in a while, otherwise this may not be true 😉 ) hobby – and it also helped me to “empty my head” after long days at work…

Next I started to create my first “completely” own designs/characters.

I had seen several Mickey mouse -balloons (in YouTube or other places in internet), but there was always something bothering me in almost all of those – they just didn’t look pleasing to my eye. There were some characters, which really were great, but they seemed to be too laborious to create with my skill-level at that point (from several balloon-sizes, which I hadn’t at that point, and even the head was done from clearly more than 3-4 balloons). I tested making Mickey mouse -character head and this is what I ended up to on the first try (I yellow 350q and 1 black 260q):

I must admit, that it still lacks eyes (I finally did use white 260q for the eyes, but I didn’t take a photo of the “final stage”, I’m sorry for that). Ears were perhaps too distant, but otherwise it wasn’t too bad for a quick first test – I decided to certainly get back to Mickey -character later, when I’ve had time to do some more testing with it.

It’s always harder to start creating a well-known character, since there are always a lot of models already around and everybody has their own opinion of how the character should look like.

I had a suggestion to create a birthday-present for a person interested in gardening. Well, at first I thought about some big flower, but then I had an idea – since I had just received a shipment with Sempertex-balloons, including yellow 660s. I had just seen this bumble-bee -character, created by Bauldy the Clown:

I thought that I should test “upscaling” of this bumble bee, creating the body out of yellow Sempertex 660. I also replaced the white eyes with black 5″ balloons (I balloon /eye). Otherwise it’s pretty much the same as the “original”. This is how it looked like:

I also tested cat’s head – here are the instructions (by Scott Kazan):

This was actually very versatile design and let’s you create a head for many different animals. This is how the cat’s head looked like made by me. I also did some-sort-of body for the cat (This was just quickly created). I also tried to do a teddy bear using the similar desing (It actually looks a little bit weird – perhaps due to colors I selected 🙂 – also the mouth is too large):

Then there was also the monkey, which I created using the same base:

It looks quite funny, actually. I actually still use this head-design (over 2 years later) as a base for many of my more laborious animals.

Let’s continue the story another time…

juho@pallotaide.com