The Circus has come to town!!!

So this is my final version for this month's Laika competition and also the final for my 3-D concepts class. I was having trouble with the colors and composition, but I worked out a lot of the kinks and am very pleased with the final outcome. I have also learned that I am not great at sewing stuffed animals and that making your own pattern is a big challenge. All in all it was a great learning experience and I always love to experiment with using type, photography, and illustration all in one piece. Below are my two previous versions with many color ways in between. I think that there show a bit of my progress.

The concept behind this piece was to make a self portrait of me and my twin sister for a present. I adapted it to my 3-D concepts assignment of creating a piece based on a circus theme with a wonky perspective. The theme for the monthly challenge that Laika holds was cute michiveous circus animal so that is where the elephant came from. He is my favorite puppet I have made so far. I really had a lot of fun with this. I am bad at giving my characters a likeness to real people, but it is something I am working on. Even though it doesn't resemble my sister and I, I think it expressed our personalities. We are inseparable circus freaks.

I started with just the image of the girls and the elephant, but I was bored with it and decided to add an audience. I was browsing the internet and had come across some old circus posters. They were so beautifully designed, and so I decided that is what my image needed. So my final piece is trying emulate the style of old side show circus posters.

 This is a shot of the elephant. His detail is not very prominent in my final poster so I wanted to give him his own close up. This was very challenging and I am not sure if I will take this on again anytime soon, but it was a good experience working with making my own pattern and learning how to sew properly. He is not very symmetrical and things are a little off, but I think that just give him more of a charm and that hand made feel.

Also if anyone is interested, this is the poem I have written along with my poster. It is a little cheesy, but I written a short story for my last submission, so I wanted to try my hand at a poem this time around.

The doctor looked puzzled, he hadn’t a clue,
She had not one child, but two!
She was in labor for what seemed like forever,
then out they came, two children stuck together!
They were called mutants, aliens, deranged,
But to their mother they were far from strange.
She saw this as a gift from above,
One child to watch, but two to love.
As they grew, people stared and kids were mean,
But they ignored this, for these girls had a dream!
The circus is where they were destined to be,
Graceful and skilled for the world to see!
The girls auditioned when they were of age,
got hired, and instantly took to the stage.
The crowd, they cheer and they scream,
Amazing! Astounding! What a team!
One in black, and one in white,
One like day, and one like night,
Twice the heart and twice the soul,
two legs, two arms, they make a whole.
They were happy as could be,
but there was something they did not see.
They did not see it from their elephant’s point of view,
Who has been fed up since their big debut.
Back in India, he had a great life,
he missed his home, his kids, his wife.
He began to devise a plan to escape this place,
Sabotage their act, and be gone without a trace.
He would pull the feather from his cap,
Use it to tickle the girls while they were in his trap!
They would be be thrown off balance and tumble,
The crowd would boo and mumble.
They would all get fired,
And then he would be free, as he desired!
Unfortunately he was too small,
His trunk was to short, and the girls were to tall.
His plan was to sabotage the act and get the boot,
instead, they saw him waving the feather, and thought it was cute.
The elephant was mad, how could this be?
All he wanted was to be free.
The poor elephant in dismay,
Would think of a fool-proof plan one day.