when it comes to making hippos there are many great tutorials you can find online showing all kinds of ways of making a fancy and cute balloon hippo but what I want to show you is a design that will actually be practical for line work fortunately I was almost never asked for a hippo and I was usually able to get the them to decide on something else but when there wasn't a line up or it was at a birthday party I didn't mind experimenting so I usually just had to wing it and come up with something that looked usually a little like a pig but at the request of one of my viewers I decided to come up with a quick and practical design it uses a 260 a heart and a little round and I am sure you can figure it out from that leave a bit of a tail like that you are going to start by making what is commonly called the teddy bear head where you have say a one and a half inch bubble a very small little bubble that is going to be pinch twisted actually you can do it now a much smaller bubble here than you would normally do for a teddy bear because hippos have their ears and their eyes on the top of their head and then another bubble the same size as that one you take your heart inflate it all the way but you're not going to leave it that big obviously you want to let some of the air out so that you have the big fat face of your hippo twist it and tie it off it helps to make the legs here remember they are very small now you take your heart and push it through the teddy bear head you don't want to just tie it to the neck because that will mess with the way the face looks so what you do is you take a small bubble here and you attach it to that like that and then the excess here it helps if you wrap it around one of the ears now take another small bubble here to bring it back down to the legs keep it soft now depending on how much of a tail you have left you could give your hippo a fat body using the 3 balloons where you go back forth and under or if you don't have much of a tail left you just give it a regular body like that 2 legs and a tiny little tail and break off the excess . I have the room so I am going to give it a fat body I am making the back legs a small little bubble with a pinch twist which is actually going to become the tail of this guy because hippos don't have much of a tail now the decision to give it a fat body or not is the kind of thing that happens all the time when you're making balloons in line work, sometimes you modify them a little bit and some are slightly different than others depending on how much of a tail you have that is where our creativity comes out so now I am going to take this balloon and bring it back to here make it the same length as this and then I am going to come back under it giving it a fat belly and we are going to break off the excess and tie it off sometimes you can get away with not tieing it but this is not one of those cases now I know he looks a lot like a pig but when a kid asks for a hippo they are going to be visualizing a hippo you'll be fine take a round and give it just a little bit of air because they have very small eyes split it in half and attach it right there it helps to bring it in from the bottom and twist them so they don't come undone draw on the eyes and it helps to draw on some nostrils and a big smile and there you go a reasonably fast very simple hippo that is practical for line work