Very Good Boy Plush (Remnant: From the Ashes)

I’ve been on a fanart plush kick lately! First Floomf from Keyforge, and now I’ve made the pet “dog” from Remnant: From the Ashes, a really cool co-op game I started playing recently. Read on for more photos and details on how I made him!

For the body, I started with NaxFX’s hare pattern (I’m a longtime supporter of her Patreon!). The only real tweak I made to the original pattern was to widen the gusset at the chest a bit. I also designed some embroidery to represent the wounds on the sides of the body. I didn’t want it to be Too Much, so I made them simple slashing shapes and sewed them in dark red.

The head and tail were drafted by myself. I looked at different dog breeds and thought that Weimaraners seemed closest to the stinkhounds, so I used a profile photo to pattern the head. It only took two tries for me to be satisfied with it, which is a huge improvement for me!

I did more custom embroidery for the face — just a simple mouth line and some big teeth. I didn’t want to make an open mouth because that seemed like way too much work for a one-off fanart plush, so I did this instead. It’s cute, yet menacing! The head was then hand-sewn to the body, as was the tail.

For the bark on the head, I measured out how wide it should be and then drew out an approximate outline of a jagged piece of bark. I refined it in Inkscape and made it into an embroidery file. This way the machine could stitch out the shape very accurately instead of having to do it myself. I sewed the file with two pieces of minky right sides together to create the piece. After cutting it out and turning, I sewed crooked lines up and down it on my regular sewing machine to simulate the bark texture, then hand-sewed it to the head. (I made in-the-hoop files for the back legs and tail, too!)

Last thing; the bandages! I picked up some soft, unbleached cotton muslin for this. I probably should have cut the strips on the bias, but… I didn’t. I just cut normal strips and sewed them into tubes, turned, and ironed them. The strips are about half an inch wide and I made about five of them. One became a tester for my staining techniques, and the other four went into the actual plush. I started with the nose and made loose loops around the muzzle, then tighter ones to cover the eye area and the bark seam, then a couple more loops behind the head. The neck and tail bandages were draped similarly. Then I added a narrow piece hanging off the nose like in the game.

The bandages are painstakingly tacked on with very small stitches. I would start underneath, say, the bandage on the front left side of the nose, bring the needle up through the bandage, do a teeny tiny tacking stitch back into the plush, then bring the needle up again an inch or so over, inside the next part of the strip. I did this up both sides of the face, down both sides of the tail, in the front and back on the neck bandages, and basically anywhere else the wrapping needed some security. I’m very pleased with how this worked because it’s secure, yet the bandages can look loose and messy in places as well. Most of the stitches are not visible at all, either.

The last step was the bloodstains! I grabbed some red, green, black, and brown acrylic paint and experimented with different mixes until I found two shades I liked: a warm brown and a deep red. I added water and experimented with different techniques on the test bandage. The effect I liked most was to get the brush very wet and just dab some drops into one spot and saturate it. The cotton fabric absorbed the water and spread the stain, drying surprisingly quickly. I made a bunch of brown spots and added a bit of red on top of some of them to give the stains depth. That sounds gross. But I think it turned out great!

And there you have it, that’s how I made the Very Good Boy from Remnant: From the Ashes! See you in Rhom, maybe?