Naptime Dragon

Last night I attempted a dragon holding his own teddy bear.  He is larger than anything else I have done, towering at about 3 inches high! Woah!

I have also learned an important lesson with him, which is that if the feet allow for ANY rocking, he will rock.  The back of his feet have a slight slant to him, which means if I put him down on a table he rocks back and forth for a second before coming to a stop on the flats of his feet.  Unfortunately because of this unwanted feature, when I was taking him out of the oven after his 2 hours of baking he fell forward onto his poor little snoot and ended up cracking a couple of spots on his belly.  It doesn’t make sense but it happened.

naptime dragon

As a result you can see a tiny bit of glue along the area between the haunches on the left and the light blue belly.  Fortunately, one of the cracks was right along this edge and when I took these pictures I had Bake & Bond drying in that spot.  The other crack, which appeared along the center of his belly about an inch to the right of the first crack was easily sealed with Bake & Bond while he was still pliable (and very hot, ouch).   I shoved a bit of the Bake & Bond into that crack and pushed until it sealed, then gently wiped away any excess.  He then baked for another 30 minutes to set both glues.  Although I can tell these imperfections are there, you would have to look to find them.  I was hoping he would be the first in line to be sold in my Etsy store, but I can’t put him in there now because of his repairs!  I guess I’ll just have to try another one tonight.

Practice

One of my goals is not only to be able to create my own little works of art, but to be able to recreate them, and to do it accurately.  Since I had enough clay mixed up in the colors that I did my Pig with a Heart sculpture with, I decided he would be my first experiment.

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Although I think that he could have come out better, I think he was a decent first try.  He is a bit bigger (likely due to the fact that I used the original pig as a measurement point for the second foil armature), his eyes are spaced slightly differently, his feet stitches are in a different spot, and his belly detailing isn’t as clean as Pig #1’s.  I also tried a different pattern on the patch on the heart (stripes instead of spots), but definitely ended up liking the first pattern better.

Despite my failings he is cleaner in general, due to the fact that I am practicing much more of an exact-o knife technique that I discovered by accident where I scrape the blade along the area where I see an embedded hair or dust particle in order to lift it (and a bit of the clay around it) to remove it.  I haven’t had much luck with alcohol and q-tips (the dust is too deep to come off easily and requires too much scrubbing) and I have not yet tried baby wipes, though that will be my next experiment.  The exact-o knife technique does require some smoothing of the clay afterwards, but so far it has been the best way to get those pesky particles off my pieces!

Cuddly Clay

One of the things that I know that I struggle with is constantly jumping from one project to another.  I want to paint with watercolors, and I want to paint with acrylics, and I want to teach painting classes and I want to sculpt.  All of these things could feasibly work together, but I flit from one to the next with such frequency that I have to refresh myself on what works and what doesn’t work every time I do something new.

I need to focus.

nessie_dragon_by_yeral-d9v6a5s

I really enjoy the look of these little clay creatures that look like they are plush toys.  I know it’s not totally original – I remember when I was in high school my cousin made a magnet for my grandmother that was a cow with little fake “stitches” on it.  It was made from Fimo clay and it was really quite cute.  My hope is to begin to create something that is my own, and even if some of the elements have been done before that they are recognizable as my own work.

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This “Pony Dragon” was my first experiment with adding a ‘patch’ to the clay in order to give it more of a plush doll appearance.  The entire sculpture was supposed to look a lot more dragon-y, but the head kind of ruins it because it looks so much like a My Little Pony from my youth.  A total accident.  I really like the Swarovski-gems-for-eyes look but I am not completely sold on it.

pig_with_a_heart_by_yeral-d9v6a5z

And not everything has to be a dragon, you know!  This little pig is my new favorite of my creations.  It seems like every time I make something it becomes my new favorite, but he feels soft and smooth in my hands, and I really enjoy his color scheme.  The eyes look good too, though when I held him up triumphantly to my boyfriend he referred to them as “dead inside”.  Phaw!  They are cute.

I am continuing on the “plushy” theme, you may see.  I like the stitches but I wonder if there is a better way to do them.  I briefly considered actually cutting tiny stitches from thin clay cane to adhere individually, but I fear that won’t turn out as lovely as it looks in my head.  Still, it may be worth a try.

Polymer Clay Fun!

I’ve been working on and off with polymer clay since I was in high school making beads out of Fimo and I thought detailed cane work was the coolest thing, but since working on Windstone PYO sculptures so much my thoughts have always come back to sculpting my own little creations, and polymer clay is one of the best ways for me to be creative in such a way.

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It’s certainly going to take lots of practice, but I am drawn to the tiny foods that I see so many people perfect.  Most of it is for dollhouses, but at the moment I just want to hone my skills so that I can create more creatures that are interacting with my tiny creations.

polymer_neapolitan_cake_by_yeral-d9v6a5m

I watch youtube videos for ideas, browse through Deviantart galleries in my spare time, and there are just so many talented people out there.  Sometimes I think I am fooling myself, dreaming of a day that I could subsist on the profits of my own art.  Other times, I look at how far some of these artists have come (Deviantart galleries that have spanned years are really such a huge inspiration to keep working at it) and have to tell myself that I can do it if I work hard enough, if I practice long enough, if I sculpt over and over..

pig_dragon_by_yeral-d9us446

I don’t think I am skilled enough for it yet, but my goal is to have an Etsy shop that sells at least one thing a week.  Wouldn’t that be great?  I just have to keep at it.

Windstone “Paint Your Owns”

If you are not familiar with the works of Melody Pena, I beg of you to go take a look at the website Windstone Editions. But before you do that, let me tell you a story.

When I was much younger (I imagine I was 9 or 10 at the time) my mother would sometimes bring me shopping with her to a very special shopping center in my home town of Keene, New Hampshire.  It wasn’t your average run of the mill shopping center because it was housed in a large brick building that was once an old textile mill.  It was the best place to shop for books, unique gifts and handmade candies.  Best of all, there was a store on the top level near the antique shop that was half toystore, half artisan gift shop.

To my mom, that meant that half of the store was OK for me to walk around mostly unsupervised in, and half was a “do not touch” zone.  It was in this forbidden area that I saw my first Windstone dragon.  It was a family of dragons actually, sitting in the window of the shop and staring out at me with beautiful glass eyes and a pearl-like finish on their delicate scales.  Although I didn’t touch them, I did take home a pamphlet of the other things that the mysterious”M Pena” had sculpted.  I can’t recall if the pamphlet had prices in it, but I do remember sitting at home with it and staring at the dragons and kirins inside and hoping that one day I could afford one.

Cut to about 20 years later, and I was having a moment of memory, thinking about those statues that I saw in my youth, and surprising myself that I actually could recall the name of the artist.  I typed in “M Pena” on my browser, found Windstone Editions, and the rest is history.

My first Windstone was a dragon, but not the type I saw in the window when I was a child.  It was a Paint Your Own dragon.

GSantiquedfront

I called it “Gilded Sky” and it is fairly well loaded with paint, to the point that I can see the lots of the brushstrokes on it in the image above.  Still, it came out pretty good for my first try and stoked my loved for painting the sculptures.

For the next few years I would end up painting dozens of these, most often dragons, but sometimes griffins or kirins or unicorns.  To this day, I am still not caught up on commissions and more inquiries continue to roll in.  It’s a wonderful thing and I am blessed to have found that community.

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