i'm horrendously bad at remembering any social media exists or interacting with anything because I don't want to be percieved but anyway I guess I'm back and going to now scream and blast pictures into the aether about this project I'm making to learn needle felting as an artistic medium and I'm making Golbo from the wonderful @zooliminology by @quiietjay
Why Golbo? look at him. I love him and chose the subject on a whim of what I would want to have hanging around on my desk or in my room when I was done
anyway, this is the literal first time I've ever felted anything at all and I'm just using a cheap starter kit of tools, however I have some experience with sculptures using other mediums that I might share some other time (clay, cardboard, styrofoam, and wire mostly); since I'd never done it before and only knew youtube tutorials and such, I experimented with how the medium felt by making a tiny "Test" Golbo, to experiment with color and compacting and stuff.
Then I started making the "real" one, using the paused YT video as a reference for the shape and scaling and just getting the general body curves down.
Once the body was done, I moved on to the color and details- unfortunately I forgot to take photos while making the eye and before attaching it, but I made it as a completely separate piece and because of the detail and hard lines between colors, it took a long time to painstakingly make, but I'm very happy with how it turned out (ignore the bit of detritus, it was some residue from the leather finger guards)
at the same time I started adding the solid pink to the extremities
I then tried to blend the pink smoothly into the body in a gradient by just gradually using tinier and tinier pieces of strands of pink fibers which worked out pretty well
when taking a progress pic for a friend, I realized I had accidentally made Golbo almost completely to scale with the image on my monitor which was not intentional, I actually hadn't held it up against the monitor before this lol
then I used some pet deshedding brushes to blend a lot of off white with just a bit of pink because I decided I wanted to make the body closer to the faint pink color it had in the video, and because adding more on top would help hide the obvious "layer lines" effect of some of my needling, this worked but the repetitive pulling is a bit tedious
then I added that to the body to give it that faint pink, before also deciding to add those highlight lines on the "feet" and body
finally, can't forget the bandage
next up I'm planning to also make a bathtub to lay him in but that's probably gonna be a bit before its done, planning at the moment to make it out of measured "panels" made from wireframe shapes of copper wire with wool felted around them