The Making Of

Happy New Year! It has been a while since I've written. There certainly is a lot to recap. This past year (2010) I was able to play a big part in the designing of a float for the Greenville Poinsettia Christmas Parade. The university I work for enters a float in this parade every year, and this year I was able to be a part of the team. The theme of the 2010 Poinsettia parade was The Twelve Days of Christmas.

I drew inspiration from the Scandinavian style of artists such as Sanna Annukka as well as a visit to Disney's It's A Small World in May 2010. I tried to incorporate the graphic simplicity of this geometrical style. The first step was to sketch and vectorize each character/element of the float. (Check out my earlier post for a peak at what these creatures looked like in the early stages.) The vector design was used by my fabulously skillful boss to create a 3-D version in Google Sketch-Up.
Our float mocked up in Google Sketch-Up

The shapes were cut from 4-inch Styrofoam. These pieces were covered with petal paper. We used more hot glue sticks than I want to remember, and everyone involved burned themselves enough to last us til next year. (Wanna see my scars?)
French Hen cut from 4-inch Styrofoam

Swan-a-swimming decked in petal paper. Iridescent and black