Garbage Pail Kids Sculpture (from old Cabbage Patch Doll)

If you're a child of the 1980's then you remember the awesomeness that is the Garbage Pail Kids. (Cool people call them "GPK's.") If you don't know what Garbage Pail Kids are then surely you remember Cabbage Patch Dolls. If you don't know what Cabbage Patch Dolls are then you're probably either 95 years old or a gurgling newborn pawing at the computer screen right now.

Garbage Pail Kids were collector's cards that parodied Cabbage Patch Dolls usually in gross ways. And each had a name that was rich with hilarious pun and wordplay. For instance, Adam Bomb (get it? Adam Bomb?), was acute little fellow whose head was exploding just like an atom bomb. I guess it was funnier during the cold war. Each card was also a sticker. To a nine year old in 1985 it was mind blowing. I always thought it would be great if they had made GPK dolls. It seemed like it would have been easy enough.

This Instructable (which I am writing in first-person perspective for a change) details how I made a "full sized" sculpture of Smelly Sally. Smelly Sally was card number 108a in the 3rd series of GPK's released in 1986. Smelly Sally is an ugly mermaid that has emerged from a newly opened sardine can.

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Step 1: Design

The first thing I did was make some sketches based upon the card. I can draw OK. But please don't judge my abilities from this picture. I used a small ruler to get measurements from the card and used the proportions and the dimensions of the doll's head to determine the size of the sculpture overall. I figured that 1cm on the card equalled 7.7cm on the sculpture. Even though I am in America I usually use the metric system. It just makes more sense. I believe that the US should adopt the metric system officially.