Day 2...Balloon School...

Tonight I went back to class at Balloon School.

I remembered all of my basic steps from class yesterday, so I dove right in with section two which is the "Nine Basic Sculptures" of balloon twisting.

The first one was the dog that I had already finished. I made another dog tonight from memory before I even started watching the DVD, and it came out even better than my first dog the other night.

The second sculpture is a giraffe, which is literally the same thing as the dog only with different sizes for things. Where the dog's body and tail are long, the giraffe's neck and legs are long. Other than that they are basically the same thing.

Next up was a sword, which is incredibly easy to make. I threw that together in no time, and easily could make another one from memory.

After the sword came a heart, which I had made a simple version of last night. This one is a bit more detailed, but the exact same thing really. I didn't end up making one of them because the one last night came out pretty well.

After the heart came one that I really liked. It was the first one that I did that used two different balloons. It's a nice big flower on a stem. The stem is one balloon and the flower is another balloon. It's really cool looking, and pretty easy to do. It came out really well!!!

After the flower came an airplane, which was a bit more difficult. There was one twist in it that I just wasn't really getting down very well. I will definitely have to practice this one quite a bit more before actually being satisfied with it.

Next up was a butterfly, which also came out pretty well...except for the antennas. The butterfly is a combination of a heart and some other twists, and is also made out of two balloons. The butterfly would have come out a bit better, but I didn't have the balloon filled up with enough air. I will give it another shot tomorrow to see if it turns out better.

That was where I called it a night. Next up tomorrow will be a teddy bear, which should be really cool. This balloon twisting is incredibly fun...and I'm surprising myself with how quickly I am taking to it. The most difficulty that I've had is with getting the right amount of air into the balloons. It seems that I often put too little air in them, and when I'm done making the sculpture there is some left over balloon that doesn't inflate correctly because there's not enough air in the balloon. I will get better at that, though, with practice, so I'm not really considering it an issue at this point.

Tomorrow I'll finish the last two basic sculptures, then go back and practice the other ones a few more times. Hopefully on Thursday I'll move on to a few of the advanced sculptures...