This post is another one on art forms from around the world. So far, we have explored Street Art, Mexican Folk Art, Chinese Kites, Japanese origami, the Sand Drawings of Vanuatu, Kintsugi from Japan, and Egyptian and Papyrus paintings. You can go back and read those posts if you missed them. Today we want to learn about Russian Matryoshka dolls. They are an emblem of Russian folk culture and…
Find an image that you want to try to adapt, the simpler the better. This is mine from 2019:
First you want to reduce it to black and white. If you want to try and do some advanced shit you can actually give yourself three colours: black (untouched), white (cut away), and gray (shaved down), but just black and white is easier. Once you've simplified it to that colour scheme, put a circle or oval around the outside of your design and connect the edges to it as thickly as possible in as many places as possible.
Then you want to start to think about structural stability. Look out for "islands," little areas of black surrounded by white, since these are impossible. Sometimes you can fix these by inverting the colours of the whole design and therefore turning them into holes instead, but you can't have any floating bits. Another way to simplify and add structural stability is by connecting things together, for instance moving a character's pupils down so they extend up from the bottom of the eye, or extending their teeth so they join to both edges of their mouth. Also watch out for extremely thin black parts, thicken any lines you need to so they'll hold together better. There can be suspended parts that hang across the middle, like the wings or ears in this one, but they have to connect at both ends, nothing should be dangling from the top. You can mess w/ the colours a little or add new lines to support if you need. Here’s how this one’s design came out:
Print your design out on a regular piece of paper, the long way, as big as you can so that it takes up most of the paper. You're going to tape this on later and use it to transfer your design onto the pumpkin.
Now cut out a circle in the top of the pumpkin around the stem w/ a knife. It can be good to cut at a slight angle inward so that the lid will rest on the hole and not fall in. Scoop out all the pumpkin guts! You can save the seeds if you want to roast and eat them later, or just toss them out. Carefully scrape out the inside edges of the pumpkin just a little to get rid of any dangling stringy bits.
Now tape your design onto the biggest, flattest face of the pumpkin. Once it’s taped on, use a poker tool to poke holes carefully all along every line. Lean towards putting them slightly on the outside where lines are thin since you’ll cut away your guide holes. After the entire design is poked into the pumpkin, take the paper off and spread some flour over it so that the flour sticks in the holes and makes them more visible. You can also connect the dots lightly w/ a pencil.
Now you’re ready to carve! If you’re doing the three colours, scrape down all of the gray parts w/ a scraper tool before you carve out anything. Otherwise just go vertically top to bottom, slowly cutting along each line w/ a saw tool, but carefully cutting out any fiddly small holes like the eyes or mouth in this one before you do the big gaps around the edges between the design and the containing oval. Once it’s all cut, shape some tinfoil into a little holder around the bottom of a candle, put the candle in the bottom of the pumpkin, light it, put the lid back on, and turn out the lights!
Enjoy your new dope jack o’ lantern! Happy Halloweeeeeeennnnn!!!!!
A quick DIY punk t-shirt painting tutorial inspired by @irlkenku's ask!
I work in costuming, so I’m like... always 100% down to share my process! Though I can’t guarantee this is the best or fastest way to do this (I think I spent almost 30 hours on this thing between creating the stencil, sewing the shirt, and all the painting :X OOPS), it’s what worked for me! Meat Droids Shirt process under the cut:
(Meat Droids concept and design credit to @keldabekush )
1. I made the stencil on paper first, and then transferred it to the shirt using a chalk marker (you can see the holographic sleeves I made in this picture! ^-^)
As for paints, I used these:
(I ended up using a weird mix of paints because I told myself I wasn’t allowed to spend money on this, and it’s what I had on hand LOL. The tube of aqua green is a heavy body acrylic, which I have learned from years of painting armor, will give you a lot more coverage per coat, but it's still just acrylic. The pink and yellow are fluorescent/neon paints, so that's why they glow super pretty in the blue low light.)
2. Make sure you have cardboard or something inside the shirt to keep paint from transferring to the back.
3.I started tracing in the chalk outline on the shirt with white paint.
This was probably the biggest time sink, but any lighter color isn’t going to show up unless you have a super flat white base.
I think I ended up lining it twice (to make sure I had a super clean edge everywhere) before going in with a bigger brush and filling in every shape with white.
This was after the 2nd coat. I ended up going in with another coat of white after this pic, just to be sure it was opaque. 3 total. I designed the stencil to have breaks in the design so I didn't end up with one big stiff sheet of paint.
4. Then it was time for colors! I went in with the aqua color first and got a few coats of that down, and then I blocked out the "paint streaks" across the face in opaque white again. You can see me starting to block them out in the pic below: (To be clear: I did ANOTHER coat of white on top of the aqua on the places where the fluorescent would go across the droid’s face, because I wanted the paint streaks to be SUPER bright!)
5. I probably did 3-ish coats of the aqua. Then I filled in the two streaks across the droid’s face with a few coats of neon pink and yellow. Afterwards, I shaded the droid with a dark blue and highlighted the lil dude with fluorescent yellow!
Add a little dark red for blooooooood:
And you’re ready to fight the Empire at a space rave babey!
Need something crafty to do during your quarantine? I show you how to craft your own bantha using fake fur, felt, buttons, pillow stuffing and easy sewing instructions.
The long time followers of this blog are probably well aware of my obsession with miniatures (and if you’re new here: Hi, I’m Wei and I love everything in 1:12 scale... or smaller). I’m particularly drawn to teeny tiny flora, and this is in part due to the fact that my mum has a thriving plant collection, but sadly I just don’t share the same green thumb. My solution: a hoard of tiny faux plants that will never wilt, some in ‘wicker’ pots no less.
Today I want to share how I make these little woven pots, in case any of you guys also have a budding romance with miniature plants and are in search of the *perfect* pot covering. The technique shown below can also be used to fashion tiny baskets, and my partner thinks these pots look like thimbles although I have my doubts about their functionality... Anyway, without any further ado, let’s get crafting!
Here are the things you’ll need:
Waxed linen thread - I highly recommend using this over other types of thread because the waxiness makes it easier for the pot to hold its shape.
Needle with a wide eye
Pair of small pointy-tip scissors
Small bottle or another vessel to weave your pot around (think tiny jars, medicine bottles, tubes for beads, etc.)
Lots of patience (this is going to take a few hours...)
Step 1:
Cut out 8 pieces of the waxy thread, each about 10 inches (25 cm) long. Next, cut out 1 more piece of the wax thread, this one about 3 yards (3 m) long.
Step 2:
Divide the 8 short pieces of thread into two groups of 4, and lay one group on top of the other where their middles meet (around the 5″ or 12 cm mark).
Step 3:
Take the long piece of waxy thread and leave 5″ (12 cm) of one of its ends hanging with one of the groups of short thread. You can see this in the image above - the long piece of thread is marked out with the blue washi tape.
Step 4:
Now to securely fasten the two bundles of short thread together, use the longer end of the 1 & 1/2 yard thread and start weaving over and under the two bundles of thread.
Wrap all around the middle a total of 3 times.
Step 5:
Now that the base is established, we can start weaving around each individual thread! These will now be referred to as ribs (as per traditional basket weaving apparently). The pattern is over one thread, under the next, and so on and so forth.
Step 6:
Once you haven woven once all the way around, just keep going! Remember to weave under a rib if it was woven over during the previous round (and vice versa). This should happen naturally, and this is also why we need an odd number of ribs (17 in this case) for weaving.
Step 7:
Keep weaving until you reach the size that you like. I found weaving around a small bottle very helpful in keeping the basket structurally uniform as it prevented me from pulling the weaving thread too tight, which otherwise would have deformed the pot.
Step 8:
Finish the pot by threading each rib onto the needle, and tucking it back into the pot towards its base. Then snip off any excess. As for the long weaver thread, thread that onto the needle as well and tuck it in beside one of the ribs in the same fashion as shown in the photos above.
As you’re tucking in the ribs, make sure to first wrap the rib around the last row of weaving (shown below) - this will help secure it properly.
And you’re done! Now you can pop this little pot around any tiny plant and it’s instantly cooler (⌐■_■) If you’re lacking some tiny potted plant buddies, feel free to pop over to my shop to peruse my collection :)
If you’re feeling adventurous, you can also weave a teeny tiny basket:
I hope you’ll give this a go! If you have any questions or run into issues using this tutorial, feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to help :) If you are new to weaving, then I would suggest first tackling a simpler life-size project first like making a mug rug.
Also, if you’re looking weave a life-size basket, I highly recommend watching this youtube video by PacoWarabi. It’s one of the best reference videos I found on this topic, and it helped me figure out how to make the base of my pots & baskets better than what I was doing originally.
So it seems like a lot of people on Reddit love my Fire Emblem Heroes paper dolls, so I decided to make a tutorial on how to make your own!
So the things you will need are:
- A computer with Wi-Fi
- A printer
- Paper
- Scissors
- Tape
- Glue
First, visit the Spriters Resource page for Fire Emblem Heroes and select your character. We will be making Linde for this tutorial.
Download the spritesheet and print it out on a piece of paper. I use two pieces of paper for both sides, but that’s completely up to you.
Cut out all the pieces you need, disregarding any extra clothing pieces/hands/heads.
First, assemble the body pieces together.
Next, assemble the arm parts.
Next, assemble the leg parts.
Add a couple of accessories on, and then put them together. Now assemble the head pieces. If the character is a male or a female with short hair, disregard this and just plop the head onto the body.
Place the assembled pieces onto a tiny sheet of paper, preferably from the scraps you made via the spritesheet.
Cover the doll up with tape.
Cut the doll out. When cutting, stop halfway and open the cut out bits of the doll and put glue on it. Do the same thing for the other side.
And you’re done! You can try putting together the other side but it’s totally up to you. I hope you liked my tutorial!
