Great cane!!... a cute guy too, with good colors.
ever so often I get a wild hair and decide to mess around with canes
So you decided to do a complex
cane?! Wow <bows down to adventurous spirit and confidence>. You should do more!
doing a rectangular cane was much harder than I anticipated so he's a little distorted
Did you create
it as a rectangular cane, or create it "freeform" with the background packing clay, then just trim the cane to a rectangular one?
Or are you saying it was just harder to reduce
being rectangular (lots of clayers find square canes easier than round ones to reduce well, though rectangular would be a bit harder, and they sometimes also create them square for easier reducing then add 4 hemisphere logs to the sides to create a round cane).
If you're not doing this already, wrapping the completed cane image
(like your penguin) with a thin layer of background clay and butting
its edges, then wrapping with successively thicker wraps of background can help keep the curves keep their exact shape, for example, during reduction. That's often easier too than trying to fill in the background with exactly-shaped pieces even if they're drawn as shapes guided by the cane. Doing the wrapping thing results in a background that's freeform though and too big in places, so after making the background too large, the cane can be trimmed down to a rectangular shape or even cut out with a large round cutter/etc. to create a round cane.