Reintroducing Products....Resin Eyes

I was going through my stash the other day and found several single eyes that I want to offer for sale.






I know you might be thinking...."What can I do with a single eye?" Well a focal piece for a necklace, collar, cuff or a cyclops type figure might all be good choices. It's what I do with them.

I listed one of the 2 types of orange eyes I have this afternoon. I have a grey green and a peach eye as well that I plan to list. Stop by my etsy shop and try out a new and unusual supply.

Creating Art based on your Fears-Big Dolls And Ventriloquist Dummies

Okay, I have this thing about big dolls.... That kissy doll is around 2 feet tall and when you pull her arms together with the palms touching she blows a kiss.

Now if the fact that old kissy was as big I was at age 3, the hissy popping sound of the kiss, surely scared me. I thought she had a snake inside her that I woke up when I moved her arms together.

The other doll- like creations I still get the creeps over are ventriloquist dummies.

My Mom used to make me watch scary movies with her when I was little. One that has always stayed with me was the 1964 Devil Doll.

This evil magician found a way to trap a victim's consciousness inside his ventriloquist dummy. He kept the poor dummy in a cage each night. So, we have the origins of my claustrophobia, the fear of being controlled by someone else, and the hatred of humanoid doll like things pretending to be something they're not....what a cornucopia of fears....

Now at age 49, I make art dolls for a living....go figure. I make Cthulhu monsters, ghosts, anthropomorphic figures, and all kinds of strange creatures.



Sometimes I wonder if I'm really overcoming my fears by making these sculptures or just feeding them.

But, I do think it is much more challenging to create something that you're not completely comfortable viewing when you're finished with it.

Sewing Free Form Figures CAPTURED

The way I work can seem very involved. In this tutorial, I wanted

to share how I
made one of my favorite pieces, CAPTURED .

I've always loved the colors of the Egyptian Funerary Art and the textures and spiraling shapes in Gustave Klimt's work.

I've always done
sketches to
help me
plan my
sculptures,
but I have never let the drawings get too involved though. The fabrics and the sewing itself often dictated changes in the finished piece.

After I collected up different shades and textures of fabrics in the the Egyptian inspired colors , I chose the wires I wanted to use for the armatures.

I wanted the starfish to act as a base and it needed to hold the mermaid securely. Even though it was only 8 inches in diameter, I chose 14g galvanized steel wire for the basic framework because it was stiff enough to hold the shape I wanted. After making the basic shape, I wrapped the 14g with 22g wire.

This texturing of the armature made it easier to cover the wires with acrylic yarn. I used a buttonhole stitch for this step. The yarn covering made it easier to attach the strips of batting used to plump up the starfish's shape.

The mermaid may have been a smaller piece, but her construction was much more involved. The process was basically the same as the starfish, but I worked in layers on this figure. After setting up the armature, I covered her with batting and started sewing fabric on the tail.

Once I had a stable fabric base I used more pieces of batting to create breasts and the facial structure . More fabric was then whip stitched over top. On the head, the eyes were sewn on and the forehead, nose and chin were then shaped and sewn down.

On the torso, the breasts were formed by sewing batting around a marble and sewing it in place. Once they were covered with fabric, I continued the spiraling fabric shapes I started on the tail up the torso and over the breasts.

The final steps on the starfish were to secure the resin eye in
place, sew on an eyelid and embellish the entire surface with beads.

The mermaid's finishing touches were beading the hair and embellishing the torso with seed beads. Elastic trim was used to bind the mermaid in place.


This has always been one of my favorite pieces.

Flying Monkeys or Why I have problems with the Wizard of Oz

I don't know about you, but these guys scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. I mean the the evil witch was scary and so were a lot of the other characters, but hands down those monkeys were the most frightening.

When we moved out here to California so that MJ could pursue an effects career, it was funny to find out that most effects guys felt that the flying monkeys were some of the freakiest images in film history. I was kind of glad to know I'm not the only one with monkey problems.

I guess I'm working on a flying monkey sculpt that will eventually be a character in my storybook/diary, The Conjurer's Workbook http://thepetshopoftheoldones.blogspot.com/
as a harbinger of doom, because villains do have to have cool or scary minions.

I am so happy with the glass eyes from Van Dykes. I've finished one piece already and am very impressed with how they look. My monkey is going to look amazing with the glass eyes I've chosen. Here is a link to Van Dykes. http://www.vandykestaxidermy.com/category/1/?source=aw-glasseyes&gclid=CKve1ISs-o0CFRLxhgodsmP0Kw
If you need any kind of eye, these are great for the price. They have all kinds of other interesting materials too.

As I was designing my monkey, I used sites that just had primates and birds. I opted out of watching The Wizard of Oz because while it's monkeys may have inspired me, it still scares me a little.