Baaa Humbug!

A Heath Way Prints design.

This was an idea from Mrs S – a sheep with a humbug¹ body.

Sheep building

The modelling of the sheep was the main challenge here. I decided to go for a ‘low poly’ design, similar to the fearsome dinosaur I made as part of the course I did in March ’25.

Returning to the University of YouTube, I followed a video by Ryan King, who is a reliable tutor and another one who doesn’t skip the fiddly bits. He made a duck, a shark and a dog in this tutorial, the dog was the best one to follow for the sheep, what with having four legs and all.

Making a low poly sheep is an exercise in making a tube and shaping it to match a sheep (I used a photo of a sheep as a guide) and then adding legs and ears.

Shading

The shading was the complex bit. I wanted to have a cartoon look to the sheep because that’s an aesthetic I like and also makes the final print a bit clearer.

I’ve done quite a lot of cartoon shading over the last couple of months, the tricky part was getting more than one colour onto a cartoon.

Doing one colour is easy enough, it’s two shader nodes. Adding a striped pattern and getting the stripes to mimic a humbug was a bit of a thinker. In the end, I found a way of doing it using various shader nodes.

So we can go from a plain white or brown sheep to a striped sheep. Then we need to add outlines.

Outlines

I’d previously used the system’s grease pencil to add lines to cartoons and it works well. For the cartoon mech, I just thickened the lines a bit but otherwise didn’t adjust the grease pencil added by Blender.

Well, most of the time it works well. But this time it didn’t, adding lines where I didn’t want them and missing out other lines. So I had to draw the lines myself. I’m part way through an 2D animation course so I had learned about adding lines and editing them already. I applied this new knowledge to the sheep, using a drawing tablet I bought a few months ago. This meant I actually learned how to use it.

Once I’d drawn the lines I was able to adjust them. Because I’m not much of an artist and I’m not used to the graphics tablet, the lines weren’t perfect. However, because they are digital, the lines are editable, so I could move and stretch them until I was happy with the look. This is similar to the way I sculpted the virtual clay to make Bob the demon and Steve the orc. I didn’t want it to be too perfect, just believably hand-drawn.

Somehow, I managed to get the sheep looking really grumpy as well. A fortunate accident with the line I drew for the eye ridge.

Final design

I exported the final sheep into Canva to add the background and lettering. The font is IM Fell English, based on an 18th century script and so perfect for an olde worlde feel.

Because I’m using RedBubble rather than Etsy, I can offer the design on a variety of things. In RedBubble I can also specify the background colour to be used in the designs; I can do that in Canva, too, but the shape of the different products means that sometimes there can be white space at the sides or the design looks too small on the product.

At the suggestion of Mrs S, I added a sprig of holly to the design that goes on the apron. Not sure why, but it works for the apron but not for the other items such as t shirt and cards.

1. Humbugs are striped, mint-flavoured sweets. ↩︎