Okay, so I decided to try my hand at making a Jojo Siwa model the other day. Don’t ask me why, exactly. Maybe it was seeing all those bright colors everywhere, or maybe my niece is going through a phase. Anyway, I thought, how hard can it be? Famous last words, right?
First thing, I needed references. Lots of them. Fired up the search engine, grabbed pictures from different angles. The outfits, the bows, that signature ponytail. Man, that ponytail is something else. It’s like its own character.
I figured I’d use Blender. It’s free, and I’ve messed around with it before, you know, making donuts and stuff following tutorials. Thought I was ready for a human character. Spoiler: I wasn’t.
Getting the Shapes Down (or trying to)
So, I started blocking out the basic form. A sphere for the head, cylinders for the arms and legs, the usual stuff. It looked like one of those wooden art mannequins for a while. Then came the sculpting part. Trying to get the face right… ugh. Getting a likeness is tough. Really tough. You tweak one thing, and suddenly it looks like someone completely different, or just plain weird.
The Hair Incident
And the hair! That ponytail. I spent, I kid you not, hours just trying to get the shape and volume right. And the bow? Don’t even get me started on the bow. It needed to be big, glittery, and sit just right. Mine looked like a deflated balloon for a long time.
- Tried sculpting it directly.
- Tried using curves.
- Tried adding a separate object and shaping it.
Nothing felt quite right. It’s harder than it looks to capture that… energy, I guess?
Adding Color and Sparkle
Then came texturing. Jojo’s outfits are LOUD. Bright pinks, blues, yellows, sequins, glitter. So much glitter. Trying to make that look good in 3D without it looking fake or tacky? Another challenge. I fiddled with material nodes, trying to get that sparkle effect. My computer started chugging a bit with all the layers and effects.
Honestly, halfway through, I almost gave up. The likeness was off, the hair was a mess, the clothes looked flat. It wasn’t looking like Jojo Siwa, more like her vaguely uncanny valley cousin.
Did I finish it? Sort of. I got something done. It’s recognizable, maybe? If you squint? It’s definitely not something I’d show off proudly. But the process, man. It reminded me of this one time back when I was trying to learn guitar. I really wanted to play this one specific, complicated song. Practiced like crazy.
Ended up just being able to play the first few chords really well, and the rest was just noise. This felt similar. Got the basic idea down, but the finesse, the details that make it right… that takes way more time and skill than I thought.
So, the Jojo Siwa model project? Let’s just say it’s sitting on my hard drive, unfinished. Maybe I’ll go back to it. Maybe. More likely, I’ll stick to making donuts in Blender. It was a good reminder, though. Sometimes you jump into things thinking they’ll be straightforward, and they turn out to be way deeper and more complex. Kind of like trying to understand teenage pop culture, I guess. Or why my old boss decided replacing the coffee machine was a good ‘team building’ exercise. Some things are just mysteries.
