By identifying the distinctive features of an object and exaggerating them, it's easy to create a shape that really looks like the object in question.

Stick eyes on a 3x3x3 block, add two cubes as ears and you’ve already created a shape that looks more or less like an animal’s face – now let’s add a little something to it.

Let’s try making the ears longer. As long ears are a distinctive feature of rabbits, simply doing this makes it look a lot like a rabbit.

The distinctive features of a mouse are its big ears and pointy nose.

Just giving it droopy ears makes it look like a dog. By painting the cubes brown, you can give it even more canine character.

Let’s try exaggerating the characteristic long flat face a monkey has beneath its nose. Now you’ve got yourself a monkey!

Make the nose longer, add narrowed eyes and it’s looking a lot like a wolf. In this example, we’ve made the wolf blue, using a slightly stylised colour scheme.

As you can see, simply by tweaking postures and colour or by adding stickers, you can create something that resembles what you’re aiming at without needing to use a lot of cubes.

Here’s a tip for anyone who has trouble knowing where to begin building their shape from: start with a flat silhouette. For this example, let’s make a simple animal.

1. Start with the silhouette of a dog viewed side-on.
2. Build it up to make the silhouette thicker.
3. Colour the cubes.
4. Attach eye and nose stickers, adjust the pose – and it’s done!

This is a particularly useful technique if you’re making a symmetrical shape. In the case of animals, even after you’ve fixed an initial position for the arms or legs, you can adjust them to make the figure look more dynamic.

The body acts as a base to which you can attach wings. By adjusting the position of the legs you can make it look like it's flying.

The most important features are the large ears and tusks. By adjusting the shape’s angle, you can make it look like your elephant is sitting.

Before creating your shape, take a second to consider your shape’s proportions in terms of height, width and depth. If you don’t do this, things could go badly wrong and you could realise while you're making the shape that you can't complete it within 10 cubes. If you’re creating a bird flapping its wings, the required shape is more or less a cube, whereas if you want to create an elephant where the overall length is emphasised, you’re best off using the full depth of a rectangular cuboid. If you want to make a high object, be aware of the size of the block you’ll need.

You might well think that it’s impossible to make round objects with just a small number of cubes, but it all depends on how creative you’re willing to be…

There are no two ways about it – this is a block not a ball. With each side measuring only two cubes in length, you can’t remove any of the corner cubes. However…

Look what happens if you position it with a football player! Don’t you think it looks like a ball now?

Just by taking away one cube from each corner, it still seems too distorted to pass as a ball.

The surrounding scene suddenly makes it look like a circus ball. It also helps to get creative with the colour scheme.

Remove cubes from each corner uniformly. It’s very rough and uneven so how can it pass for a ball?

Now it looks like a giant inflatable ball or even a boulder.

Use the following images as a reference when removing cubes. Another method is to use a 3x3x3 block as the base and build on that.

As the examples above show, it's important to remember that even if a shape does not look like a ball by itself, the surrounding objects can make it look as if it is.

You can download the puzzles that have been featured on this page via Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. (Puzzle Pack 1: from 5th March 2010)
After enjoying these puzzles, you can use them as a reference for creating your own original puzzles.