Let's see... I've spent the last few months leading up to Christmas on paper crafting and journal making but before that, I did a lot of crochet and knitting. I spent about 15 to 18 months on working with yarn and making animal dolls.
So then I went through a creative block for about half of January and was looking for inspiration for my next project. While I was waiting for a good idea to hit me, I cleaned up and painted my kitchen. I made new curtains for my kitchen windows and painted all the woodwork and cabinets, gave the floor a good scrubbing, reupholstered the kitchen chair seats with faux leather too.
In fact that's what got me started on the kitchen in the first place, just re-doing the chair seats and you know how that goes. Once you upgrade one thing in a room, everything else looks old and dirty by comparison. My son helped me reach the cabinet tops and paint the doors and woodwork.
The kitchen looks so good now. I even re-organized the pantry and washed the windows. I just couldn't stop. AND - in the interim I did start sculpting again. I made some little mermaid sculpts a few years ago using April Jensen's mermaid tutorials. It's been a while. I love sculpting and working with polymer clay. But I'm really more of a doll person than a sculptor. I like the parts movable so I can pose them. So I usually like to make the heads, hands and feet out of clay but I like the bodies to be soft material over a wire armature so I can pose it. So it's no surprise that I'm working on a few fairy faces now following along with an artist I just discovered on YouTube named Certainly Caroline. Her work is amazing.
She gives free tutorials on YouTube and shows you how to make these wings for your fairies by printing dragonfly wings on transparency film, colored with alcohol inks or markers then attaching wire and baking liquid sculpey on each side. I added glitter to the back side of mine and gave them a coating of glossy accents which makes them more rigid than just layers of liquid clay alone.
Another of my favorite artists is Annie Wahl and her old people. One of my favorites is her gossipy church ladies sitting on a couch. I'm really not the picture perfect beautiful doll collector type of artist. I like my dolls a little quirky. I'm more of a fairy type artist. This little guy is from an Annie Wahl tutorial. I just have to put some clothes on him.
I thought I would make some faces and molds, then make a few character fairy dolls. I like 'Certainly Caroline's' tutorials but wish she were still active in making them. But I'll learn what I can from what she's got out there. I tried a new way of making a mold that only works with smaller things unless you want to use a pack of glue sticks... I don't. First you put a layer of vaseline on the hardened face sculpt and then put it in a little box or make one to fit. Just cover the face with hot glue and make sure you get all the way down to the flat bottom edges.
It comes out of the mold pretty easy and the mold won't warp your clay like a soft mold will. Just brush corn starch or water on the mold and push your clay into it for a perfect replica of your doll face. It saves you time to use a push mold. You can change a few things on the molded sculpt to make it unique so it doesn't look like a complete replica.
So far, 2023 is starting out to be the year of the doll for me. Or at least until I get tired of doing it OR until I get busy with the Spring planting in a few months.
