Tigerbunny Paper Toys and Shadow Box

So I decided to do a breakdown of how I made the paper toys for the Tigerbunny show!

First Melissa had told me the theme was Tigerbunny and that she wanted to collaborate on something together! We weren't sure at this time what products we were going to make so I just decided to draw my own interpretation of Tigerbunny girls.

We had decided on paper toys! So I did rough sketches based on how I thought about constructing them. I knew I was going to do the head similar to the My Melody toys I did for the Sanrio show. And the 8 paneled paper ball thing always ends up looking cute so I made that into a skirt. I decided that it should be flat on the bottom though so that the toys could sit without supports. So I styled the skirt similar to how the bun is constructed for the hamburger in the Paper Wonderland book.

Then I made super rough templates in Illustrator.

I built the rough templates out and drew where I wanted to add arms, legs, face details, tab supports, etc.

Then I broke down the toys so that I could see how to draw the templates and where to place the cut marks to add pieces to the template.

I combined my artwork and the rough templates to create refined templates to run through the vinyl cutter. I use the vinyl cutter when I am making layered paper toys because I can not cut out the super fine details. For the printed toys I usually just cut by hand. I passed the template to Melissa so that she could add her artwork to the blank templates.

The printed versions look like this!

Which are available for sale at Leanna Lin's Wonderland

The layered cut versions look like this!

The tiny piece assembly can be hard. Tweezers and glue!

My husband made the shadow box for me, which is a wooden box, with a picture frame as the door for the front.

The background inside is also layered cut paper.
The detail on the back and inside the glass are stickers.

This is also available for sale at Leanna Lin's Wonderland!