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