If you couldn’t make Made with Love: Crafting for a Cause‘s workshop on designing monster softies, you can still pick up the basic principles. Here are some ideas to spur you on to the adventure of designing your own softie. You can also get the pattern for Querk, the friendly monster softie at left, complete with instructions and pattern pieces, in pdf format, free for noncommercial use.
Basic monster shapes
Monster shapes are blobby, irregular, and asymmetrical. While monsters can be any old shape, here are three general types to get you started. Once you’ve determined a basic shape, then you can determine other characteristics.
- Roughly rectangular, with big facial features and a few appendages (see photo above).
- Ameba-like, often roughly triangular, frequently having antennae and the suggestion (or more) of a tail. Think of mutated snails and underwater creatures.
- Circular or bell-shaped with long dangly arms or legs, sometimes showing strong resemblances to octopi.
Monster faces
At the most simplified level, monster faces need to match up with the body, meaning that the size, scale, and emphasis of the features needs to be gauged to the shape and amount of space they fill on the monster’s body.
- Blocky monsters have lots of space to fill, so their features can be large and zany, with huge eyes and gaping mouths. Make sure, though, that the top of the toy can be distinguished from the bottom (for example, place eyes or other upper-face features toward the top; put feet, chin, or beard toward the bottom; curve the mouth definitively such that it indicates which way is up; or place the face in the top two-thirds with empty space below to tell where it stops).
- Monsters with the bulk toward the bottoms of their bodies have less space at the top for features, which may explain why they tend to have petite mouths (if any) and eyes protruding from the tops of their heads on stalks.
- When the appendage of a monster is featured (as with octopus-style monsters), the space for the face is usually smaller in proportion. When space for facial features is in short supply, the most telling part of the face, the eye, tends to be featured.
Monster features are mutated. The fact that features are differently sized and shaped than one might expect is, in fact, one of the distinguishing features of a monster.
- Monsters need to be distinguished from humans, and the easiest method is to morph humans’ most important features, their eyes. Monsters can have three eyes, yes. One eye, certainly. Half a dozen, perhaps. But if a monster has two eyes, they will be unevenly sized, huge in proportion to the body, or with eyeballs pointing in odd directions. Or they will be placed asymmetrically on the face or made to extend from the head on stalks.
- When mouths exist on monsters (and they need not), they tend to be either very small or very large, and they can be located where they would not be on a human. Mouths are great emotion-transmitters: Whether a stuffed toy is friendly or threatening has much to do with the mouth configuration.
- Don’t be afraid to leave off some of the human features; monsters can lack nose, eyes, or mouths as needed.
Adding other elements
Parts from any other entity, living, historical, or mythical, can be added on to a monster. Think scales and claws (dragons); wings and feathers (birds); spiky armor and plating (dinosaurs); blobby outlines and irregular dots and patches (ameba); and fur, tails, tongues, and teeth (wolves).
The most important principle in Monsterdom
Monster elements cross and mix genres among the human, the animal, the prehistoric, the mythic, and the primitive. The key to making a monster a monster—instead of having it turn out looking like, say, an owl or a stegosaurus—is to make sure the parts don’t match. It may just be why such strange beasties are so appealing.
Want to get started? Take Querk, our friendly monster in the photo above, and adapt it to your own vision. The pattern is available free for personal or charitable use, courtesy of Made with Love: Crafting for a Cause. NEW! JUST ADDED: Our list of free online monster softie patterns and tutorials on designing and constructing monster softies.
