In keeping with my recent tradition of sending out Totoro-themed holiday cards to friends and family each year, I thought it would be fun to double down on my recent work and do this year’s illustration as a tin toy rendition. I have a tin wind-up Totoro I received as a gift from friends who visited Japan about 15 years ago that I was able to use for reference. 

Because of its unique unibody shape, I initially thought it might be easer to use 3D scanning app called Kiri Engine to input the geometry, but the resultant scan had too much data (along with my lack of experience working with Kiri), so I ultimately ended up modeling it myself by hand in Blender. It really wasn’t as complex as I thought it might be. I added the background ornaments from BlenderKit’s free model library. Ultimately it was all in a day’s work – or play.