Candyman Kane

After I finished with my Christmas gift crochet project I decided to do some experiments related to diagonal color changes, because I knew that sometimes I could get a nice angled transition even if I didn't explicitly use the "diagonal" technique I've been experimenting with. Because of the direction of the stitching it turns out that you get "natural" antialiasing in one direction but not the other.

I was doing the experiments with red and white yarn since that's what I had out from my Banjo Santa project, but doing all those red and white diagonals was making me think of one of the ideas I had decided wouldn't be a good gift, a character with a candycane stripe. And the terms "candyman" and "candy cane" were floating around in my head and bumped into the classic film Citzen Kane and I decided to name the character Candyman Kane. I've never seen the movie, but I know it has some sort of political element, so in my head Candyman Kane became a rabblerousing political figure at the North Pole who claims that Santa is an out-of-touch elite who is mismanaging things. With that much characterization I couldn't feel comfortable discarding the idea so I decided to create him.

Getting the diagonal stripe to work with the geometry of my humanoid figure was way more difficult than I expected. I kept running into situations where color transitions and the increases and decreases needed for the geometry were interfering with each other. After a few tries and a few revisions to the color pattern I finally got something that mostly worked. I felt that the asymmetry of the diagonal red stripe running across one eye helped give him a slightly sinister aspect, and I also incorporated some asymmetry into the eyebrows and mouth that I put on with black yarn.

I felt it was important to give him a cane, but that turned out to be pretty tricky as well. One of my back-burner projects is to figure out a good way to implement thin "sticks" in crochet. Ideally they would be stiff enough to be load-bearing -- Candyman Kane's cane is mostly just cosmetic, but I'd like to have a technique for doing things like insect legs, weapons for fantasy characters, etc. I tried a few different things, I wasn't 100% satisfied with the technique I ended up using, but I also wanted the project to be finished at some point so I needed to declare it good enough. Maybe I'll do some more experimenting outside the context of a specific project.

Here's an animated gif from a video that gives a 360-degree view:

This project took longer than I expected (you may notice that we're already a third of the way through January and I thought I'd have it done by Christmas), but I think I would have regretted it if I hadn't tried. And I think I did learn some things about implementing color transitions, so that's valuable. And even though I have a tendency to fixate on the things that went wrong, I think the overall result is a fun little character.