Hi everyone,
I'm not really a hobby baker or a baker of any amount at all, but my cousin's birthday is coming up and I want to make him a very special cake. We grew up together like brother and sister and I thought a theme cake of his favorite childhood movie/cartoon would be a special gift. I have it perfectly envisioned in my mind, but I've never attempted something like this before, aside from the time I made my own fondant.

For the cake I would like to add little sugar sculptures of a few characters. My question is, do I use fondant or this stuff called "gum paste"? The sculptures will be relatively small, but not miniature. Some will be sort of cone shaped, so hollow is okay, but others will be tubular and worm shaped, so hollow may not be good for pieces such as this.
Another question is..how do I go about coloring the fondant or gum paste? I've heard of kneading color paste into the fondant, but I'm inexperienced with gum paste. These characters will be multicolored and will need some very detailed features, so is painting on details an option and how do I do this?

I know I could research this through the forums, but I don't really have time to sift through everything to find precisely what I need. If you know of some posts that are thorough and would be helpful (videos would be awesome!), please link me and I will just view them directly. The birthday is next month, so I'm trying to quickly get all that is necessary.

Thanks for all your help!

You can try different things, you can try to make the shapes with rice krispie treats and cover with fondant. or you can use a mixture of fondant and gumpaste to make the fondant get hard faster. Or just plain gumpaste. I made some jungle animals that i used a mixture of modeling chocolate and fondant.

I have used the other methods too, but it all depends on what exactly you are making and what you like best. HTH

Oh and you would knead as much color into the fondant or mixture that you need. Or when I used the modeling chocolate I just bought the colors I needed in the candy melts and if I needed to darken it then I just added more color, but it was much easier than trying to knead a whole batch.