An explanation of the muscle inflation rig, used in the “Swell Friend” story and maybe others in the future:

Please excuse the terrible basic Spirit Halloween mask. I’m new to the furry scene and have yet to make the investment there in something nice. I do have some Smitizen masks that will be part of future postings! The tiger mask is much too small for my head and ends up with this ridiculous permanent gaping expression.

The starting point is a foam muscle suit like the ones made by eBay user “cosplaymagazine,” so that even without any inflation there’s a pleasing initial shape.

Over this is a spandex dive skin which has been outfitted with a series of air lines. — 10 in total, because that was the largest air supply splitter I could find. The splitter allows these to all be fed from a single hose, to an air compressor through a hand trigger. The air lines are held to the suit with sewn-on elastic loops, otherwise they’re hard to position and it ends up very asymmetrical. These run out the neck and down the back, so they’re generally not seen in photos.

A stretchy skin of some sort is worn over all this — a larger dive skin, the tiger-skin unitard, or unitard plus football gear. Aside from giving the character something to wear, this helps hold the various balloons in place. As you can see here, they’re all drooping haphazardly without a skin to provide some structure; it looks much better once there’s some tension to hold things in place (see inset).

The limiting factor at this point is this outer skin. Seen here, the balloons can go way bigger, but the largest spandex garment I have — a 6XL dive skin — defines the upper bounds for now. A belt holds the waist in, otherwise things expand into that space and he looks fat (weirdly-shaped lumpy fat, not even good-shaped fat) instead of muscled.

Photoshop is used to remove the air hose and trigger, and sometimes the camera remote and/or the background. The “liquify” tool does get used occasionally, but mostly to help with symmetry when the two sides don’t inflate equally. Though the character could be made to look even bigger using this, I’m a fan of practical effects and try to keep that aspect authentic. I also don’t like the obvious warping artifacts it incurs.