A Little Summer Sun

Last year, we planted some sunflowers in our garden in hopes of attracting more bees. What really ended up happening was that they grew so large that they stunted the growth of all of our veggies haha. This year we did the same thing but only planted them at the end of the garden instead of throughout and are having much better results!

Funnily enough, they also started popping up all over our yard! Last year the birds of our neighbourhood must have had a feast with all the seeds produced by the first wave of sunflowers and spread them around the yard. There were even some that appeared in the neighbour’s yards!

To me, sunflowers instill feelings of warmth and happiness, just like spending time in the summer sun with friends and family. So after being surrounded by sunflowers all summer I couldn’t help but feel inspired to re-create one out of paper.

This model ended up being much more challenging to design than I initially thought. After making the rose last year, I thought “How hard could a sunflower be? It’s such a simple, straightforward flower compared to a rose.” I ended up being pretty wrong.

The first speed bump was the petals. While they were very simple compared to the rose. The sheer amount of them took much longer model than I'd like to admit. This was mostly because I ended up tweaking and re-positioning them over and over again. At first, they looked too flat, then they’d look too curved. Then I had to adjust them so that the edges and faces didn’t overlap or intersect each other, which of course changed how they looked and started the cycle all over again.

There’s a good lesson in this that can be applied to any artform though. Eventually, you need to stop yourself and move on. With any project, you can always keep making little adjustments and improvements until you’re sick of it. What you need to realize though is that nothing is truly perfect and even if you eventually reach a point that you think is “perfect” other people might not think so. After all, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.

Once I stopped the cycle of petal adjustment the rest of the model design went fairly smoothly. The sepals were pretty fun to make because they didn’t really need to look neat and tidy. The stem was fairly simple to make and my design to reinforce it was much simpler than the rose. I fretted over the size of the leaves a little bit but luckily I had a lot of reference material in my backyard to help me make up my mind haha.

The final hurdle that gave me trouble was the instructions. With over 500 parts it was quite the ordeal, mostly due to how blender seems to export svgs. They aren’t very clean and are made of more lines than necessary which roughly doubles the amount of time to make the illustrations. It got to the point that I debated making an instructional video first instead but decided it would probably be just as long or longer and kept going. I have my eye on some software dedicated to technical illustrations that should greatly reduce the time spend on them as well as increase the quality. It’s pretty pricey though so it’s probably going to be a while before I can justify getting it though.

It all came together in the end though and I am very happy with the results. After all the hard work I now have a little piece of summer that will last all year. And I get to share that little piece of summer with anyone else who builds it which is also a good feeling!

As always, it’s time to move on to the next project though. I’ve got lots of ideas and I hope to share a lot more of them!

Thanks for reading and happy crafting!

The Papercraftsman

Zooming around planet Zebes

The first model of 2021 is here! It took much longer than I had anticipated but it’s finally here!

I decided to go with something from my favourite game series: Metroid. At some point, I want to do a Samus model or a Metroid or a Ridley but I don’t feel my skills are quite there yet so I decided to settle on a zoomer. It’s not the most imposing or fearsome enemy but I figured if anyone has ever even tried Metroid or Super Metroid they should recognize what it is haha.

Overall I am quite happy with how this model turned out. I probably had the most fun during the initial design process because I took a little creative license with it. When playing the original Metroid I always pictured zoomers looking very bug and crab-like than anything else and I tried to work that into my interpretation. Because of that I probably drew the most inspiration from the Metroid Prime concept art because their renderings are more bug-like than the drawings of the original Metroid. The eyes were especially fun to play around with.

As mentioned before this model took a lot longer than I had intended. Some of it was because I had to go back and re-do somethings like the eyes; they were too complex initially. Mostly though it was because with over 600 parts the instructions became a bit of a nightmare haha. Almost every day I worked on them I ended up failing to meet the progress goals I set up for myself simply because of the sheer volume of work to be done.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is too much I can do to refine the process with my current setup as when I made my first model I approached the process of making the instructions in so many ways that I am pretty sure the way I did it is the only way I can. This means I will probably be looking at expanding my software library here to try and find a more automated way of spitting out those instructions. Until then I think I am just going to have to try and scale back the complexity of my models while I look for a solution.

With that, I think I am going to get started on my next creation. If you’re curious about what I am working on and want more regular updates then consider joining my Patreon. I tend to post more regular updates over there and even show some behind-the-scenes photos of the design and construction process.

Thanks and happy crafting,

The Papercraftsman