I'm making art with a totally unique medium.
And if you thought that balloons were just
for making dogs or swords at kids parties, get ready to be amazed because this might
just be the biggest thing I've ever created.
But I'm not doing it alone. One, two, three.
All right, so I've got our balloons, right?
What that? No, we're going to need this.
All right, so we're going to build a wall.
I'm going to blow it up.
Are you ready for some noise?
Before we can get into our balloon art, we need a lot of balloons.
And instead of tying every individual balloon, we're tying two balloons together
at once and then twisting four balloons together to make a quad.
And it's mostly going well.
So this is Jazza.
When I decided to try something as ambitious as balloon sculpting,
I knew that Jazza was the artist I wanted to collab with.
He is an incredibly creative person
and an ambitious YouTubers, and he loves taking on creative challenges
in just about every medium you can imagine.
He's a quick learner who loves to dabble and learn on camera,
and will be showing even more of our balloon build over on his channel,
so please check that out at the end of this video.
It's really hard to find an art form that Jazza hasn't already tried,
so I was excited to be able to bring him a new challenge.
The real question is, did you at least watch the videos that I
sent you to watch to show you what we were supposed to do today?
No. And this is Michelle.
Michelle is our resident balloon expert for this project,
but also a very good friend of mine, going back about 15 years now.
We've lived together, worked together,
volunteered together, and she was even one of the bridesmaids at my wedding.
She's built an amazing party and entertainment business and trained so
many other professional entertainers to create balloon art and host kids parties.
She's worked with huge brands,
created some amazing pieces, and she's recently been on TV here
in Australia alongside some of the best balloon twisters in the country.
With all the balloons blown up and ready, this makes the beginning of our wall.
We're using this special, stretchy tape.
Basically, it's like a Florist tape, and we are tying our quads together
to make a stack of balloons that we'll then tie together to make the main
structure of our wall, which we'll later decorate with details.
So all of the balloons that we are using
today are actually made of rubber, not plastic, which means they are recyclable.
And when we are done,
we're going to be looking for some local childcare centers to donate as many
of these as we can, and we will recycle the rest.
So we're making pretty good progress.
It is actually coming together quicker than I thought,
but we are not up to the fiddly stuff yet, so we'll see how we go.
Time is passing pretty quickly and we do have two days to get this done,
but we'll see in another few hours how far we've actually got.
Because once we get into the details, things will probably get a lot harder.
but it's a lot of fun, though.
Our balloon stacks are done, so it's time to get into some details.
The details are the key difference here between these looking like generic balloon
arches and actually looking more like a unique structure.
All of the balloons that we are using are either round balloons of different sizes
or the long balloons that you usually use for twisting.
But the different techniques allow us to twist them and create different shapes
and flowers to fill our wall with all kinds of interesting details.
We're going to go for at least five
petals, so holding onto the knot, you bend it.
So it's about four fingers, twist three
times and then you fold it down and you want to make it as best as you can,
the same size because this is where the details count,
and then you got this.
And then just keep holding onto it as well and it will get tighter as we go.
So then bend that balloon down and then wrap it around for this one,
and then fold it down.
And that looks like it's going to be almost the right size.
We've made a bunch of these small white
flowers for our wall and finished them off with a small balloon blown up with just
a little bit of air and twisted into the center.
While Jazza and I were focused on finishing the details of the wall,
Michelle was working on a super interesting giant flower that I had no
idea you could create with the balloons that we had here.
So when I first saw these,
I assumed that this was a special shaped balloon that made these petals.
I had no idea that it's actually the same as this balloon.
I'm going to put this balloon inside of this balloon.
So I'll fold it in half and put it inside like this.
That's a bit of a strange funky shape.
These were round, right?
Yeah.
I've never tried balloons in balloons.
Okay.
And then you tie the green together end-to-end.
The green one's escaping. Oh, no.
Don't let it escape.
And then squeeze it out.
Then you've got a beautiful petal.
That's really cool. There you go.
See? It's a real petal.
Good one. That's what I wanted.
These are ugly.
Oh, no. Oh, no.
These are so ... that's a master technique right there.
You've got to prime it.
You got it.
Yeah, that's perfect.
That's perfect.
Let it out.
Tie the green ones.
Yeah.
Squeeze it. it and then you can bend it. It worked.
Yay. I have it.
It's beautiful.
Well done.
One of the balloons from the flower actually popped.
So I ended up making a new stem and decided to get a little adventurous.
So we're working on a tree right now. Don't know what they're doing
in the background, but we're working on the base of the tree here.
So we've got a tiered effect going, so I've got bigger balloons at the bottom,
and we're slowly building up slightly smaller sizes each time.
And so as it gets smaller and smaller and smaller as we go,
and then we're going to add a whole bunch of different balloons on the side.
Ignore them. So if that wasn't clear
with the interruptions, we're trying to build a tree.
We've created a base frame with wire, like the armature that you'd make
for traditional sculpting, except that we're sculpting with balloons.
After the first layer of balloons are done, we've used the longer balloons
to create details and to start to make this tree feel more like a tree.
Okay, so Michelle and Jazza are now going to keep working on the stuff for his
video, which means I am on my own now to keep working on this tree.
And I'm a little bit nervous, but I'm also a bit excited because now I
get to just wing it and get creative and just see what happens.
So wish me luck.
She saw that and thought, He's going to need adult supervision.
Who would have thought that bringing
children's lovely balloons would bring out...
Would make me revert to being a child?
Do you know me, Sarah?
So maybe adult supervision is a good idea.
Even though I've been doing this for a while now, I'm feeling a little out
of my depth without Michelle's guidance now on these leaves.
But it's a chance for me to get more creative and experiment a little more
for myself instead of just following her instructions, and that excites me.
I'm creating more balloon clusters,
but mixing up the sizes and trying to make them feel more organic.
I started by creating quads,
very similar to what we've been doing all day, but Michelle suggested building
bigger clusters of balloons on the floor before attaching them to the tree.
And something about the word clusters
really unlocked the goal I was trying to achieve.
And I finally felt more confident in what I was working toward.
So day one is done and we have made
actually much better progress than I expected.
Not really knowing what to expect when we came in.
We are exhausted, but we are ready to come
back and finish this off tomorrow and really just see what we can do.
Details!
We're back for a second day of balloons
and the tree and background are coming along well.
The dinosaur that Jazza and Michelle are working on has seen huge progress since
they started yesterday afternoon, but it's got a long way to go if we're
going to see it all finished in the time we have available today.
My finger here is so sore from all the tying of balloons.
I've only just started day two.
I've recruited Natalie to help me blow up my balloons to save my fingers
and hopefully save some time while I work out how to attach all these extra balloon
clusters to my main tree without leaving it too unbalanced.
So if you're wanting to have a go at this
at home, here are some simple balloon twists that Michelle is going to teach us.
First one you can do is a loop twist.
Section off one bubble, fold it down to create a loop, and then twist it up.
That's a loop twist right there.
If you have several loop twists, you can make various animals.
Here's another loop.
It's a dog. A dog.
Can you show us a very special trick to make a very special tail?
Sure, but only if you give this a blow on the end for me.
Okay.
Did you eat chicken nuggets for breakfast? No.
The next one is a tulip twist.
And if you combine with the loop twist, you can make a flower.
Start with the balloon and let's go.
tulip twist...
And it exploded.
Tulip twists are hard, so don't give up.
Tulip twist.
Simple flower. And now a shock twist.
A very simple snake.
That was so cool.
I've learned so much.
That's simple.
Thank you, Michelle.
A success story right there.
We have most of the structures in place
for the tree and the background, so it's all about the details today.
Jazza and Michelle are working hard
on their dinosaur build with some very cool techniques.
What even is this?
Meanwhile, I'm getting into some balloon
twisting now to make some beautiful leaves.
Maybe it's jazz is secretly sabotaging us. I don't know.
I'm really proud of my leaf.
Do you know, I actually looked back
on some old photos of the things we used to make together.
And the thing that I was the proudest
of when we used to work together was when we made princesses one day.
With that body skirt?
I hate that skirt.
I made a bunch more of these leaves over
the next hour or so and continued filling the gaps on our back wall.
And I'll show you what these leaves are for in a moment.
But first, I'm having another go at the distortion technique to make some rocks.
So the goal here is we're going to put
some little balloons inside a big balloon, and then we're going to inflate the big
balloon and inflate the little balloons and see what happens.
Getting the balloons in is the first challenge.
Got to stop accidentally pushing the button as I'm trying to put them on,
it's not helping. All right, the first one's going up.
I can see it.
It's about here.
The little balloons are inside the big balloon.
I'm going to tie them together.
I'm going to start letting air out of the big one.
It's going to be a little rock.
There we go.
I just got to do that a hundred times.
I feel like one of the ones inside might have popped in this one.
Maybe they didn't tie properly inside.
Back to the leaves, we've decided to use these all together as
a display to hold our beautiful prehistoric flower.
It did need a little extra support, but this gave me a chance to get creative
and stretch my skills in arranging the balloons and working around
the limitations of this unique sculpting medium.
And with these final touches, everything was finished.
We actually made the deadline, you guys. Well done.
We did it. It was awesome.
Yeah.
If you want to see more of this build and see all the details that went into these
dinosaur, please go check out the video on Jazza's channel now.
And if you'd actually like to have a go at balloons for yourself,
Michelle's Instagram has some amazing tutorials to get you started.
Plus, there's just heaps more of this level of stuff over there.
So please check it out.
I'll pop links in the description for both.
See you.