Hot Air Balloon for Lynn G
 February 5th, 2009 by Sandy McCauley


I have another GREAT designing challenge to show you today! Thanks to Lynn G who posted a request on the KNK Studio GE Yahoo Group for help with desiging a hot air balloon. Once again, I had to play around for a bit, walk outside and think about it for a bit, and then it hit me that the secret was, once again, in the power of polyarc editing.

Here’s a link to the video:
Designing a Hot Air Balloon

A couple of things I discovered after making the video:

  • If you’d like to expand the balloon to include two more colors for the complete range of a rainbow, then just make your circle 3.5″ instead of 2.5″ and you can add two more circles/colors: see below.
  • When I tested 3.5″, it seemed that I needed to tweak the top node more, plus you’ll have two nodes on the left side to delete, rather than just one. But otherwise, it works the same.
  • You might want to flatten your balloon a bit after creating it. I just shortened the height without changing the width: again see below.
  • You might not want the circles spaced perfectly at 0.25″ each. To get a more realistic 3D look, try making the outer segments thinner and gradually increasing in size towards the middle. For the sake of time, I didn’t do this, but you can experiment with it yourself after you make your first one.

    • Once again, Klic-N-Kut Studio comes through for us with flying colors! (Pardon the pun! :P )



    4 Responses to “Hot Air Balloon for Lynn G”

    1. Gail says:
      February 6, 2009 at 12:13 am

      LOVED this tutorial – thank you!

    2. Lynn G says:
      February 7, 2009 at 9:31 am

      Thank you so much Sandy. I just knew you would come up with an easier way to do it. I spent hours fiddling with different ideas – just goes to show how lucky we are to have you to help us.

    3. Michelle says:
      March 2, 2009 at 3:59 pm

      Hi. I have tried several times to send you an email, but I keep getting failure notices. Is there another way to contact you with a question?
      Thanks,
      Michelle

    4. Sandy says:
      March 11, 2009 at 6:49 pm

      I have a number of other email addresses and actually use smccauley45@cox.net the most. Since you were having problems, I have added it to the home page here, in addition to my other one. Thanks for letting me know, Michelle! And thank for ordering a Groove-E!

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