not mia anymore!

so, yeah.............. been a while!  Life has been........  yeahh.....  moving, foot surgury, new job, almost buying a house, maybe applying to a big name toy company,  not getting a house, trying to figure out life in general and trying to downsize so i can fit in my parent's place till i can figure out whats up..... O_o

so anyway.  Hopefully stuff will be happening again on a timeline where i am not so bogged down getting things done i have no life or time to update anything.    lots of new projects, ideas, etc.  Thought about wiping the whole blog basically and starting over at a new place, too much work for the moment so here we are.... rambling....


On to fun stuff.  Things I have been doing.... wow ok maybe photos will be best to show whats been up? not in any specific order...... check out my flickr to see more of what ive been up to.... ^_^    Hopefully much more fun stuff to see soon!

IKEA ponies and loot and new clay!!!!

I mentioned in the last post that i had an adventure to IKEA over the weekend. My dad and i drove the hourish down to Pittsburgh to grab a bookcase/ desk thing i picked out online. I have never been to IKEA before and wooow is it huuge!!! I think we got lost at least 3 times in less than 15 minutes! It was well worth it. We only picked up the bookshelf/desk thing, because dad needed to get back but it was well worth it! I spent the rest of the evening, with the help of Mr. handie-dad, and we got the thing put together and set up1!!! （≧∇≦）



it has been hard for me to get anything unpacked since we moved because i only had a couple of tiny bookcases. No room for anything. So this and the shelves i put up helped tremendously, but alas off to school i went again before i got much of anything done. but i am really pleased with how it is all turning out! now there is plenty of room for my yet to be organized ponies!!!
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧…

This is the stash I got from the library today!!! (•̪┌┐•̪) I am so pleased!!! I try to use recycled mailers for my etsy. I always feel bad for the still usable envelopes that students throw out, and looking at the trashcans and recycling bins is just sickening how many of these are just tossed. It came in good timing (thank you God!) for i had just run out of mailers and have a couple of orders to get into the mail ! (which will be out by the weekend! promise!!!) On top is a lovely book on botany who's covers are just screaming for art. I just cannot resist a blank canvas...

Getting ready to start a new doll for drawing class... I know sounds weird but as the prof pointed out, you need to have drawings for most any art, sculpture, paintings, even pottery. You don't always need drawigns, but it helps you work out all the details. I decided to try some new clay i had picked up for a steal at Jo-ann's a while back. It is an airdry clay called Stonex. It is fun to work with, being more like traditional pottery clay, but more plasticy in feelign when dry, and is alot heavier than my usual paperclay. You can carve into it when semi and all dry which was great for my tastes.

I built it over Styrofoam, and didn't pack it on to hard, expecting some shrinkage. What i got when it dried was well a little bit more shrinkage than hoped for.... (●´― ｀●) sad panda...





Well at least it cracked in the back and the eye does look cool... i didn't even carve there... it just happeded, which made it all the more neat... but i don't think this is the clay i will be using. A friend suggested that i use the foam you buy to put inside of cushions, and i may give that a try; wrap the foam in plastic wrap, then put the clay on... it should work in theory...

the journey of a bjd artist

so it is not a recent thing that i have taken up sculpting dolls. I have been doing so for many years but I have never realized that I could actually make a moving doll! I have been fascinated by ball jointed dolls and with being a poor university student, and an art major, I have taken up doll making once again. My first attempt was last winter/spring. She is a creature I had come up with in 4th grade and mostly forgot about. I came across some old drawings and decided it would be fun to redesign her. I tried crocheting and that failed. I could not get the detail I wanted. I had other projects I had wanted for bjd making, but I needed a simple design to test out how the joints work, since I don't have one in my hands as a reference point.

She came out a little frightning. The white polymer clay was sticky beyond belief and the only tools I had were a toothpick and my fingers. none the less... she's scary. I found out that I could carve the polymer clay easily and I loved it! (always loved carving). So I ended up frustrated then realized this was a test piece, and it didn't matter, so I had a blast and failed at joints, gluing them together in places so that things wouldn't fall apart (ie her knees) but even though she is frightening, I still love her!

This summer, before going to Japan, I was messing around with some polymer clay while watching tv and made a face. The skin tone is waaay less sticky. So this poor head was just sitting there looking forlorn, so I decided to attempt another doll. This one worked out a lot better. I had done much much more research, and had it pretty well under control... till I had to get the styrofoam out.... I forgot polymer clay is plastic... so I melted the styrofoam out from her innards with fingernail polish remover. This works great for stone based and paper based clays, but not for polymer. She still has a strange odor. It made her very brittle. if the clay was thicker it wouldn't have been such a problem, but after 4 months can tell the chemical reaction is still going on. She gets brittler every day. So I tried to make her fast. which was fine, but the clay kept chipping, so I'd fix it and bake it again... that doesn't work well for small extremely brittle dolls. her crotch has broken out in about 6 different pieces at least a dozen times, and her knees are shot.

she only needs her arms and hands, minus elbows and she'd be finished, but for her protection, especially over my Japan trip, I had to pack her safely away hoping to make a mold and cast her in resin ( a kind of hard plastic) and work from that piece to finish her.

In coming home from Japan I find out the house is on the market and my parents had packed everything up... ok not everything... but most everything but what i had taken with me. So being bored and such I ended up grabbing some paperclay at Pat Catan's. I also decided I had nothing better to do than try again! so I again redesigned my Mom-Tom, as I had none of the originals because they were packed, and set to work!

I am having a much better time with the airdrying paperclay as i can let things dry and add things on top and carve and all kinds of fun things! so it's my new fav clay! She is turning out much better than my past attempts!


Check out more pics on my flicker! http://www.flickr.com/photos/hlbmlp/