Interlude créatif – Le château ambulant! – Page 2

Howl’s moving castle!

** Cliquez ici pour la versio n française **

Howl’s moving castle is one of our favortie family movie! When the Ghibli films made it to Netflix, we might have went overboard and watched most of them on a loop lol!

Since I had so much fun makin my little Spirited away dolls, I wanted to continue revisiting these movies by working on a tiny Sophie and Howl!

I first worked on tiny Sophie… and I have to say that at first I was a bit afraid she’d be too much like the snow queen lol! But in the end I was very happy with this little doll.

The doll was very straight foward, but I had to adjust the arms a bit the get the whole « puffy » shoulder style of dress. I also added a bit of details to the front of the hair, but overall it was quite an easy project.

When it came to Howl, I first wondered if I should go ahead and make his more flamboyant persona, as he appears at the start of the story, or the more subdued, « natural » Howl he becomes near the end of the story.

After debating for a while, I decided on the second option… mostly because I was dreading finding a way to crochet his very colorful shirt/cape thing lol!

I could have ended the project here, after all these two characters are at the heart of the story… but I couldn’t resist trying to put together their very own tiny Calcifer! Of course this was a little more complex than a simple play on colors with my basic mini doll pattern…

This was really… a trial and error process, but I thought maybe I could treat the flames as flower petals… and it worked… kinda?

Just before I got to it though, since was still very intimidated at the prospect of putting it together, I decided to get the little eyes done first.

And since I was trying to be quick about it, it took me twice as long…

Yeah… I kept trying to put on the clear top coat before everything was properly dry… which inevitably made the whole thing a runny mess.

Not my finest moment, I know.

After the second time I had to redo the eyes, I remembered my acrylic paint pens… o.m.g. It worked and I was finally able to finish up and put together little Calcifer!

Also allowing the eyes to dry for a few hours… helps a lot.

In the end, Calcifer is not my favorite tiny doll ever… but with the two other dolls he’s recognizable so it will have to be enough for me lol!