Designing donuts #1

 Welcome to the first Designing Donuts post, where I show off sketches, WIPs and discuss my inspirations and thought processes when designing new plushies!

So this weekend my main aim was to actually finish a couple of designs that I'd started last year, and also revisit some older designs that I'd made smaller versions of, and see about making them into the regular sized plushies.

The first of the designs to finish is already done, and the second is being filled and sewn, of which both will be ready for monday. 

Pictured; Blue iced donut plush with purple wing and white daisy decals

Pictured; A WIP of a ghost themed donut

Both of these designs will be in my Folksy store on monday!

There is also a second variation of the daisy donut, of which the main body is a heart, but I made it with no centre hole. That design may get revisited and maybe the original will get finished, but as of the moment I am focusing on the standard round shape.

I was really inspired by simple bold designs; it was a trend in knitted cardigans that led me to designing the daisy donut. They would use really clean, simple patterns to make the cardigans look cute and fun and stylish, such as daisies, clouds, hearts, berries, etc.

I wanted to go for a nice chunky looking daisy with wide petals, and during the assembly phase I went for sewing the centres of the daisies as opposed to the entire thing; I really liked the idea of the petals being able to move freely, and it would look much neater and more polished as a design. Its tricky to stitch a nice neat rounded shape, so sticking with the centre prevents the design from looking too messy, and I think it worked perfectly fine in this instance.

As for the ghost design, I really wanted to do something using purple felt. I always think of purple as a good colour for spooky ghost themes after playing Pokemon and being inspired by Lavender Town, and after seeing some really awesome purple artworks that brought that idea to life, it became obvious that a ghost theme was what I was going to do with the purple. The large donut, however, is not the first design I did. It's actually the second, more simplified version. The first features a ghost town sihlouette with the ghost details added on. It looked pretty good, but I felt it was a little too much, hence the redesign. 

Original ghost town donut

I kinda want to do the ghost town silhouette again though, so this might be a future design.

So, as for the future designs that I'm definitely adding to the shop, I'm going to be doing a yellow version of the daisy plush, and a cloud version. Both of these were originally smaller donuts that I made prior to sizing up the plushies, and want to make some adjustments; 

Original Cloud donut design

Original Daisy donut design

I did some sketches to translate to templates;

A scan of rough sketches of the cloud donut design

A scan of rough sketches of the daisy donut design

Based on the sketches, I decided that for the cloud design, I'm going to go for rainbow sprinkles. The original design that I made really lacks the impact that I was going for in a cute design, whereas the reworked sketch with rainbow sprinkles really adds to the fact that it is a donut at heart, however I think I may do smaller sprinkles on the top so as not to make it too crowded.

As for the daisy design, I'm going to stick with the idea of it being a variation of the blue daisy donut; so five large daisies, with just the centres stitched down. The other designs have potential, particularly the third sketch, with one large daisy as an accent piece with white sprinkles; this one I would like to maybe do in the future as part of the Peepers collection (see my Folksy shop for more of those!)

So that more or less concludes everything I have for this Designing Donuts! 

The blue daisy and ghost donuts will be available monday (October 23rd), so be sure to check the shop and my instagram (The Winged Donut) for updates!