Red Panda with Pie

I’m really happy with the fluffy eyebrows and bright colours on this one. Making the cherry pie was also so fun as we were in the autumn season and I really wanted to eat pie.

I spent most of my time on the pie when sculpting the red panda. The pie crust and aluminum pan were so vivid to me, I could almost taste it in my imagination. Positioning the white streaks and eyebrows on the face also took a lot of trial and error to get just right.

This piece was definitely harder to paint than sculpt. There are so many different blocks of colour — the ear itself has three! The pie crust also had some shading to make it look freshly baked and the aluminum pan had some highlights to make it look like metal. Initially, I made the red panda look too orange so I mixed in more red and did a subtle ombre between the colours. Although it was so subtle that it’s hard for me to tell exactly where I did it.

I like the way this red panda turned out and I’ll be making more variations of this design on different forms. For future pieces, I’m going to experiment with other red underglazes that don’t bubble as much. This one bubbled a lot, almost looking white in the crevices.