"Helmut" Papercraft (Patreon)

In December I had the honor to build this papercraft in the honor of the late Helmut. It was a commission that was a gift for Helmuts owner. Here is a bit of the process on how I go about doing these Papercrafts.

💟First I start off with multiple sketches. this one was easy because there were only three ideas we bounced around, but I made sketches for hor the finished pieces would sit in the frame as well as what different ideas and fonts would look like. The basic idea was inspired by the moth papercrafts I make, with the face of Helmut framed in the middle, with a paper ribbon with his name on it. There were two ideas for the outer frame, either just cat grass or cat grass with a hint of the grey sofa that Helmut liked to pee on. I've never painted a stained sofa so this request was hilarious and a challenge as well. And the commissioner went with it in the end, because it was a fond memory. Sometimes memories are weird, but they are still memories kept to be treasured.

💟After a quick back and forth with the commissioner we went with the stained sofa and the simple font for the ribbon. At this point I did some quick studies of Helmut on scrap paper, so that the drawing on the watercolor paper would be on point. I don't own a light table and erasing too much on this paper (it is hot press Arches watercolor paper, the same I use for the papercraft cards) is really bad for inking later on because the damaged paper makes the nib pen lines feather.

💟After inking I build the watercolor washes. With Helmut it was a bit of a struggle because he was such a beautiful cat and he looked kind of brown grey-ish at first, but there are bright red undertones in the browns as well as a beautiful sharp lines around the eyes. I have no idea what race Helmut was but he was a gorgeous cat.

💟Next pic is the finished watercolor washes on Helmut, but before I added any white highlights with gouache. I always feel like there is such a huge difference between watercolors only and the finished drawing with highlights. Usually I have the different frames on different sheets of paper because usually there is more overlap in them, but with Helmut there was only one frame and it was more decorative than to build depth so I painted it on the same sheet to get a feeling on how the whole assembled piece will look.

💟I did not take any more progress pics because the only thing left to do was cut everything out with a scalpel and frame it. There was not a lot of assembly, only the ribbon gave me a bit of a headache because it did not want to work the way i wanted it to work.
Instead here is the finished piece. It is always super hard to take pictures of Papercrafts because you need good light to show the layers but then it always reflects on the glass. This was my last IKEA frame that still had glass instead of the transparent acrylic panel. I know there are reasons why they decided to switch to acrylic (I think one of them is weight so they need less emmissions to transport them and that they don't break as easily) but I hate the flimsy feeling of a frame without glass. I like frames that have a heft.

So how do you feel about a pet portrait that also shows the pets bad habits? I think it is rather charming but I have no idea if I would hang a piece with a pee stained sofa.