Amazing Morph

In honor of the new Amazing Morph Episodes, out this month, from the iconic Aardman studios, I knitted a little Morph for myself,

 I gave him a full wire armature and even some bolts on his feet just incase I want to animate with him at a later date. I really enjoyed the challenges of this project like knitting a round shape for his head. I got an amazing responce when I tweeted these pics and it seems that Morph is as popular as ever.

Good luck to all that was involved, I cant wait to see the new episodes, im sure they'll be great,
 and Morph, good to have you back buddy!

DK Publishing Leopard Design

Thanks to the awesome people at Rumpus animation my work was scene by the equally wonderfully people of DK Publishing.
They were interested in commissioning  me to knit a couple of animals for the illustraions a new pre-school educational book.

The characters were an intellectual leopard, a fun creative monkey and a loving elephant.

We started with the leopard and I was asked to come up with a few designs based on a bit of refference material I was given. We talked about how we wanted to character to be quite toy like, cute and as original as possible. Here is what I came up with:

 I was playing with the proportions of the limbs and the length of the snout but we couldn't agree on what looked best.
I was sent a refference picture of some cat character designs from an artist they had found on google images. im sorry I cant tell who that person is because I dont know!
I didnt want to straight up copy this artists designs because thats not cool! So I drew over the designs to make the cat more leopard like and more original. The drawings with the round ears are my designs.

 At this point we were adding the proposed colours and I was still trying to make the character look like a toy. I was trying to discuss the joints and neck of the character but we couldn't come to a conclusion. So before I knitted anything I offered to show them a 3D felt mock up representation of the design of their choice which was this one at the top left of the pic below.

This was how it turned out:

 He has a wire armature inside to make him poseable. I designed the pattern myself which was the hardest part of the make.

 Unfortunately we still couldn't pin point what they were looking for so we drew a line under that project with a view to come back to it if they find a character design they all can agree on.
I guess thats the trouble with working with lots of creative people, we all have an idea of our own but its hard to merge them all together. I did learn alot about the whole design process from this project and got a chance to build on my sewing skills. I also used a bit of photoshop which is nice every once in a whille.