I was tasked with making a scene from the children's book 'The Gruffalo'. The scene had to depict the storyline as well as be safe in the hands of children.
Having been one of my favourite stories when I was a child, I had a good idea of how to approach this. I designed the scene around a path that flowed through the middle of the base and off into the distance. As the Gruffalo is so enormously large compared to the other forest creatures, I wanted to give a sense of scale; so I added two knobbly trees with twisted branches that were going to drape over the Gruffalo's head.
I had two references to go off, the illustrated book version and the animated version. I decided to go with the traditional illustrated version as this is more well-known. Even though I was working off of 2D images, the 3D models came to life.
From here I listed all the elements that were drawn in the book, such as acorns, (caps on and off, green, orange and brown) pinecones, mushrooms, (red, brown and white) leaves (green, brown, yellow and orange) rocks, grass tufts, boulders, logs and moss. These were all made with a metal wire inserted into them during the making, which was then individually drilled into the wooden base.
As for the characters, I wanted to infer their presence the as to not clutter the scene, as well as make a game to find all of them. I had the fox down his hole, the snake slithering into the log pile, the mouse pointing to the road ahead, and the owl's feathers lying on the path. All these characters were made with polymer clay.
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