Even if you are not from the UK or US, you probably know the song 12 Days of Christmas. I am somewhat partial to that song, with its very nice, over the top imagery of ever more luscious gifts being piled onto the dearly loved recipient.

It lends itself very well to illustration, of course, and so I thought I’d give it a try to turn the gifts in the song into paper models.

This will take a while, of course, but the first step was to determine the level of detail. Making all 364 gifts in total would take a lot of time, and even just making the 78 gifts of the last verse will be a challenge, so each gift should be easy to make. Which requires a good deal of abstraction.

Here are the first attempts of some of the gifts, but I still consider some of them to be too detailed:

The Partridge:

The turtle doves:

The French hens:

The golden rings:

Of course, the models will be colored later on. In fact, I am thinking about two versions, one which has the typical mono-colored face “low poly” look, and one which is more detailed, almost like painted wooden toys.

Well, I am pretty sure I won’t finish this before (or even shortly after) this year’s Christmas, but maybe for next year. If you are interested, I’d like to hear from you.