Friday, February 8, 2008

Cupid panda

This project comes (rather randomly) from the comic Tea Club.
It's very cute, and centres around a university student who loves tea. (I think it's defunct now though) It featured a rather odd little story about Cupid pandas, which I think was a reference to an earlier comic by the same artist. Sadly I can't find that comic anymore, and you might need to see that to understand quite why I find the pandas so appealing. Suffice to say, they're not quite a sweet as they look.
So the plan is to knit a Cupid Panda. I suspect getting the shaping right will be a little tricky - it's easy enough to knit something roughly the same shape, but I think the cuteness with these things has a lot to do with the detail - getting the proportions just right, making everything curve just enough. I'm very interested though in how this relates knitting to drawing. I think with drawing, and more so with cartoons, the big skill is understanding what it is about an object that makes it recognisable, what the cues people latch on to are.
So I'm planning to have two attempts at this, hopefully the first one will let me get the shape roughly right, and with the second I'll be able to refine it to something that has the same cuteness as the original.

I'm not quite sure what I'll do with it once it's done though. My current plan is to have it done somwhere around Valentine's day, and send it to the premature babies unit, who apparently are always keen on knitted toys. I'm not generally keen on valentines day, but this scheme appeals to me for slightly convoluted religious reasons.

Hugh.

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