Anyway, I’ve always liked the Bialetti logo. The cute, but proud, little italian man. As I was waiting for the coffee to finish, I looked at the little man and realized it shouldn’t be difficult to make him in 3D. Not the smartest thought to get when you are trying to do some work, but it did appear anyway.

Trying to find the Bialetti logo in a resolution good enough to be used as a backdrop for the 3D model, I stumbled across a website where I learned this:

Between 1957 and 1977, Carosello [the Carousel] was a 10-minute spot of advertising broadcast every night on Italian national television immediately after the evening news. More like a variety show than hard-sell publicity, it was so popular that it became normal practice in Italian households that dopo Carosello, tutti a nanna (‘all the kids to bed after Carosello’). A familiar cartoon figure on Carosello was the ‘little man with a moustache’, who had his finger raised high in the air while his mouth formed the letters of the alphabet. He was a caricature of Alfonso Bialetti (1888-1970), founder of Bialetti Industrie S.p.A., the Italian cookware giant, and the inventor of the Moka Express coffee pot.

You can read the rest of the story at theflorentine.net.

I’m not the fastest modeller, but I wasn’t aiming for stress either, so I spent about 2 hours on the sketch. Still not finished though -Alfonso is missing his jacket and vest- but that’ll come sometime. With this sketch I wanted to catch the overall scale and feel of Alfonso. Later, I’ll use it as a template for a high resolution model.