I'm doing a Sonic the Hedgehog cake for a birthday party next week. I'm wanting a Sonic figure on the cake, but not sure if I'm good enough to make the figure out of gumpaste. Any ideas on how (besides going and buying a small figure) to do this? I'm thinking of possibly tracing it out somehow, but not sure how to go about it! Thanks!!

If you don't mind that it's not 3D, you could do a frozen buttercream transfer (FBCT). Print out an image of Sonic, tape it to a stable base and put some plastic wrap over it. Put in the outlines first, then fill in the things that will be in the foreground first and those that will be more in the background last. Put the whole thing, base and all, in the freezer till it's totally frozen. When your cake is ready, take the transfer out of the freezer and flip it over onto the cake. Carefully peel the plastic wrap off and there you are! Easy, fun and they look amazing! Here's one I did of a Bratz doll:
http://cakecentral.com/gallery/2022316

could you maybe do a run out sonic? and the use stiff royal icing and some nozzles to do textures? it will be 2D also goodluck

I haven't been deocrating that long and when I decided to make my UP cake for a cake show I just assumed that I would make the gumpaste people and thought I would deal with it when that time came. When the time came I was freaking out. So I found as many images of them online as I could. I enlarged them, studied them for days. Then I mentally broke down the components of each of their body parts in my head and then made a plan as to how to attach all of these in a cohesive form. I tend to start with the body, shove a lollipop stick in the middle with some of it sticking out the bottom so you can attach it to the cake.

Mold the body, then seperately mold arms and legs and attach them-sometimes with toothpicks, then on another lollipop stick make a head and then attach that. With the body parts being seperate it makes it easy to redo something if you have to, and not have to start all over.

Not sure if any of this made any sense, but HTH.

Lots of sense, amygortoncakes. Thanks for putting it so clearly. That's basically what I do with my figures, except that I use bamboo skewers in varying lengths instead of lollipop sticks.

I just made the horse and pascal from Tangled out of gumpaste and the other thing that I noticed I did was work with the pieces of the character that I knew I could do. So I didn't want to attempt the whole horse so I had him hiding in a bush with his head and front legs sticking out, like in the movie. No one will think why didn't she make the whole horse because it goes with the theme, but really I did it that way because it easier. I posted pics of just the gumpaste horse in my pics.

Going along the lines of amygortoncakes, I think you should just study the pictures. Since I started playing with modelling (an entirely recent thing) I look at all kinds of things and see them in a way that I would model them lol (i don't mean things I'm modelling, iv just started to see the world in cake form) but if you keep looking at the pics, of different angles etc and have little practice for a at certain parts to see what you can do or if you can improve on them.