CARTOONING A NEEDLE FELTED CHARACTER

To make a wacky needle felted character you need to consider cartooning ideas. You can make funny, unique soft sculptures by applying cartoon concepts.

This tutorial is an example of a simple concept you can try. The shape of your characters head can be anything you want.

We'll start with a pear shape. Needle some alpaca fleece (or whatever you have) into the shape of a pear. Now lets look at that shape.

You can put the large end up.

Or try the large end down.

Are you starting to see the possibilities from just this one shape?

Let's use the large end down for this character. Place a nose right where the pear shape starts to flare out into the larger end. Next, add an upper lip to your character.

This is a 3d sculpture so let's round it out by adding tufts of fleece and felting it on the cheek area.Then add some simple eyes by rolling some white and needling it in the eye socket area.

Add some eyebrows, black pupils, and some black to the inside of the mouth. Needle a little pink colored fleece onto the lower lip.

Add some wacky hair and complete your needling until you are satisfied with the character.

Now think about other shapes for the head and give them a try. Try round, diamond, square, oblong and see what you get. Exaggerate the jaw, cheeks, ears, nose, or whatever area you feel like doing. This is needle felting and you can do whatever you want. You have total control.

The body instructions are available in pdf file form to make this cartoon character complete. You will need adobe acrobat to read the file. We did go back and add eyelids and eyelashes to our head to complete our look.

Now go make that needle felted character that is uniquely your creation.

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