#i am a tumblr newbie im sorry if this is reprehensible behavior

[evilautismcrusades]

The Trials and Tribulations of the Jebble Sculpture

Once upon a six hours ago, I had a dream. It was a dream of creativity, of beauty, and of my beloved insane jester. It was a dream of cherishing him, a wish to hold him in my hands.

I didn't yet have access to getting my grubby mitts on an official Jebble talking plush, but what I did have was clay.

My first attempt begun smoothly. I had forgotten at the time that I owned oven-bake Sculpey polymer clay, and as such I used the more obscure Sculpey air-dry clay for my creation. I worked slowly, tediously carving each and every silly detail into his goofy round face, delicately attaching the pupils to his eyes and the ears to his head.

Working slowly was my mistake.

As I soon realized the fate to befall him, I began to panic, hastily kneading bits and pieces of clay in an attempt to finish forming him before he became too solid to work with. My efforts were for naught; in fact, in my rush to put on his features, he began falling apart, his features now messy and his body covered with divots from my nails. It was too late for him. There was nothing within my abilities that I could do to save him.

Thus, I had to make the difficult choice to abandon him. He sat on my dresser overnight and, in the morning, was as hard as plastic. His strained expression demonstrates his eternal misery, having to live with a half-finished body, wearing a half-finished outfit, covered in dirt and cat hair from the stickiness of the clay, but alas, there was nothing to be done.

This is how Pebble was born.

I wasn't satisfied with the outcome of my efforts. All this time spent on a dud, and for what? To leave him to sit barely right of my keyboard, forever gazing into my soul?

No. I had to try again.

That moment was when I realized how to do Jebble justice. I dug through my drawers, moving aside long forgotten craft books and papers, and pulled out my old box of Sculpey oven-bake clay.

When I say old, I mean old. I'd had this clay since four, maybe five Christmases ago, and that didn't make working with the already tough material any easier on my hands. It was dense, crumbly, and disheveled.

By some miracle from Toby Fox himself, I managed to make it work. Using the same original formula I had for Pebble, albeit at a slightly larger scale, I began sculpting. Two balls, one on top of the other.

The further I progressed, the more hopeful I became, but I tried to keep my expectations low. I hadn't sculpted anything since I was eleven, and most of my memories of it were the sadness that accompanied my beautiful pieces breaking.

And yet, I couldn't help but think he was turning out splendidly for my first time in so long. Even if his gums looked unnatural, and he had no bottom teeth, and he was currently little more than a slightly detailed head atop a sphere, he was beautiful. Surely nothing could go wrong...

I worked on him more and more throughout the evening as I binge watched Matt Rose and Jeaney Collects videos, often looking back at his ingame sprite for reference. He wasn't perfectly accurate, quite stylized in fact, but what did it matter? I loved him all the same.

It was here I realized I would have to make some further stylistic changes to his design, both for his own safety and for my own convenience. I knew from my own experiences that Sculpey's oven-bake clay could be fragile, especially without glaze (which I didn't have) or an internal wireframe (I did have crafting wire, but nothing to cut it with, so he unfortunately went without any). If I wanted to keep him for longer than a month in a house with my clumsy self and a cat who loves to knock things over, he would have to be optimized.

So, such changes were made. I decided to skip out on giving him arms, for the amusing rotund aesthetic it provided and to minimize the parts on him that could break. His legs would be simplified and his body would simply be placed directly atop his shoes. Black paint would be used to add the illusion of shorts. His tail would be made short and thick, curled closely to his body so nothing poked out too much. His ears and the bells of his hat were his only particular weak spots, but they looked nice as they were and couldn't be modified too much without rendering them unrecognizable.

He was still fugly, but it was a start.

I then would hit another roadblock: his collar. At first, it's quite difficult to distinguish just what it is based on looking at his sprite, and his other official depictions don't make it any easier; on the official Jebble plush, he dons the typical scrunchie-like poofy collar, but on the rest of the merchandise, including shirts and posters, it's more flower-shaped, for lack of a better word.

Personally, I am on the side of Jebble fanartists who portray him with the former, but I was quick to choose the latter for my sculpture for the sake of my own sanity; delicately folding all those ruffles would have been painful, and making and attaching a bunch of little triangles was infinitely easier.

Thus, this was his final design. Simple, skrunkly, and round.

Here's him fresh out of the oven, lightly toasted and ready to eat paint.

Getting paint to match his colors was quite an experience, helping me to remember just how blue he is canonically, despite how often he is depicted as purple. I, too, am guilty of making his blues warmer than they are, but what can a guy do? It looks good with the yellow and green.

Regardless, I wanted to stick to the canon colors for him, so I dug up my old bag of paints and mixed them up. Painting him went quite smoothly, and he was almost finished, but then...

One minute, I was holding him with confidence, taking care not to touch any of his still-wet paint as I added slightly darker shades of blue to his face.

The next, he had fallen face-first onto my desk with a loud thud.

My heart was broken, and yet it was still racing in my chest as I internally hoped that nothing had fallen off of him, that none of his paint had been smudged in my panic to pick him up, but even then I knew hoping was worthless. In this horrific accident, he had lost a good chunk of his right ear and one of the bells from his hat. How could I let this happen to him? How could I let my confidence do this to my beloved boy?

I didn't have glue to repair him, and for a moment I sat there on the brink of tears. All of my efforts really were for nothing after all. I'd might as well hit him with a hammer so he wouldn't have to suffer the same fate as Pebble.

Somehow, through the fog of desperation and sorrow, an idea came to my mind. I still had the pieces that had broken off, and maybe, just maybe, I could reattach them with the air-dry clay.

I stuck small blobs of it to the places that had broken and squished them tightly together, then smoothed out the edges to somewhat blend it in with the rest of the clay.

Thank the stars it (mostly) worked. The bell that had fallen off was too small to reattach, and had to be remade entirely from the air-dry clay, but it worked. He was fixed.

Recovery was a longer journey for him than it was for me, but thankfully he had his beloved hubby and weird brother to comfort him in these trying times.

He even got to wear Spamton's jacket, which was somehow simultaneously too big and too small for him, and he wound up looking like he was T-posing.

But after all this, once his repairs were dry, I repainted him and he was finally finished.

Behold him in all of his demented gremlin grace.

To top it all off, here's a doodle of him happy and recovered. <3

#deltarune #jevil #spamvil #spamvil isnt at all the focus of the post but tis mentioned so i thought id tag it for ppl who cant stand the ship #i am a tumblr newbie im sorry if this is reprehensible behavior #clay sculpting #sculpey #jevil deltarune #and his weird younger brother pebble #we dont talk about him