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oldoni July 1st, 2008
madly emulating bone…. i wonder, if the dragon’s spine is roughly 27″ long, and i have until about July 20th, i guess i need to be applying bone at about 1 1/2″ per night. of course - that doesn’t include the ribs, the feet and talons… hmm, don’t think i counted in the neck on the dragon…. and the lady isn’t finished yet. and there isn’t a base yet…
sheesh.
oldoni July 1st, 2008
ok, this last year I set myself a goal to achieve a bjd in resin. I love bjds - i love the idea of being able to play with them, to move them around and for them to be relatively small but fairly sturdy. In my head, i have strange moving insect people, or slithering sea creatures and more….
But before I can start one of these, i needed to work thru some hangups i had about jointing the limbs (I’ve started lots of bjds over the years - but never gotten much past the heads and torsos). I also had to learn to make silicon molds, learn to cast in resin, learn to clean up the blamed things (its amazing how much sanding goes into preparing a doll for molding — and how many time you have to make new molds. resin is very unforgiving, every single wrinkle, bump and fingerprint shows up in the resin, even if you can’t see them in the polymer or paperclay original)
i was really lucky, my daughter Meg started working with me, and kept me going when my short attention span might have urged me to move on to something else…. unfortunately she turned out to have allergies to the resin and the mold material. Fortunately my son Nate stepped in and started making the molds and helping clean up the casts…. years of WarHammer really paid off (
I decided to start with a very simple bjd, Lola - 8″ tall (9″ with her high heel feet) about 22 separate pieces —- she looks very different in the resin than she did in the polymer original — and she is definitely not a slithery sea creature, but she taught me what I needed to learn, and I think she turned out pretty well. Anyway - she is lots of fun to play with….
this is how she started out :
and this is how she looks in resin :
oldoni June 25th, 2008
thru the bjd forum Den of Angels, I met an Australian artist - Therese Olsen. A couple of years ago Therese created her own 60 cm resin girl bjd body that she called TwigLimbs. this year she has followed up with a lovely new version of the body, TL2, and an original sd head that she has named Ylisande.
you can see pics of Ylisande on the TL2 body here
and you can talk to Therese about her bjds at her livejournal here.
Therese is an incredible artist - and she has this very cool goal of getting multiple artists to create optional heads for the TL2. and coolest of all, she invited me to try creating heads for her too. so I sent her a headsculpt to try - and she is very kindly cleaning the head up for molding and casting.
I am taking this body and both heads to NIADA to show, and they will also be shown in the UFDC show, Expressions…. We really lucked out, and Magalie Houle Dawson of MHD Designs has agreed to make one of her fabric art outfits for the doll to wear…. I am very excited about the whole collaboration - We named this head Saranbileg (a Mongolian name meaning, approximately, moon gift, and Magalie is creating an asian fusion costume for her.
in the meanwhile, here are pictures of my sd sized bjd head, Saranbileg, on Therese’ TL2 body….
I really loved these pics - they made me think of the terracotta soldiers buried with the Chinese emperor….
oldoni June 24th, 2008
spent part of May in Washington DC …. and spent time at the National Museum of Natural History. I would have loved to spend even longer in their hall of skeletons…
but while I was there i got this idea for a figure - the Bone Dragon’s Daughter.
The idea being that she is lifting up the skull/mask of the dragon - and its spirit is settling into her as she becomes the bone dragon …
almost put my eye out twice working on the armature for the dragon, so i sure hope this is worth it! to keep it light its body will be skeletal and a combination of paper, flumo and premier….
here are some in progress pics…
oldoni June 11th, 2008
not having enough brain power to realize i’m running on empty — trying to get 2 bjds in resin for NIADA in July and getting ready to give brief demos on jointing bjds there, preparing to teach a class on sculpting heads for bjds in October, trying to get 1 decent piece in paperclay for gallery night at NIADA, and contributing to a couple of magazine articles…. so i decided to try some commissions for bjd heads to keep from getting bored. I wonder if i can convince my boss at my day job that i should be squishing clay at work….. no, maybe not.
this commission thing is hard for me - i really tend to get side tracked by an idea and swing off in directions not necessarily desired by the person who made the commission.
but its fun to listen to other folk talk about the heads they want, and to see what kinds of ideas they spark. The person i started the commission for had the most gloriously pointed eyes and the neatest shaped mouth. I still haven’t caught her mouth right…. but the first try i went for I got side tracked off into a dangerous dark fae head… had great fun.
but the person wasn’t looking for a dark unseelie queen…. so I started working on making her into a kinder, gentler fae -
and I think she is beautiful this way too. hmmm, that right ear doesn’t look right, does it?
I think there is a problem with people seeing past the grey clay. I may need to work on these in a more normal skin tone. but meanwhile i guess i’ll make molds and cast junk casts in neutral resin to show folk. Its interesting, I think the silicon for the molds may leach some of the diluent out of the sculpy when you make molds of the unbaked clay. it gets hard and crumbly.
I wonder how it wold be to work on these in earth clay. may have to try that - earthclay moves really nicely…. i wonder how it works with silicon….
ok, enough procrastination. need to get back to sanding…
oldoni June 8th, 2008
we spent May moving my eldest and her husband to Illinois …. Melina, Paul and my husband rented a u-haul truck and drove from California to Illinois with all their worldly goods. I had the easy part of the move - their two cats, Bascom and Ceres moved into my house, and once the kids were safely in Illinois - my job was to fly out there with the cats.
Bascom and Ceres are great cats. Ceres was rescued as a 3 week old or so kitten from the bushes at one of the community colleges I work at —- she is fairly unique looking - dark tabby with some stripes, some spots and the longest thinnest tail i’ve ever seen on a cat. Ceres is a reserved cat, she loves Paul passionately, but unless the rest of us are eating fruit or pie, she isn’t very interested in us.
Bascom is huge (actually they are both about the same size - somewhere around 14 lbs each, sturdy little beasts) beautifully marked with a pure white chest and dark beautiful spots and stripes. He loves Melina, but he is happy to share his wonderfulness with the rest of us too.
but anyway - they don’t like their cat carriers. and we needed to put them in the carriers to fly them to their new home. So we came up with the great idea of putting the cats and their carriers in the kids’ bathroom the night before our flight. (which was at 6:15 in the morning - getting to the airport by 4:30 am is not my idea of joy…..)
so the night before, my daughter Meg helped me move the cats - she grabs Bascom, plops him in the bathroom and then goes off to grab Ceres (who of course escaped and ran all over the house before she was caught)
I go and grab the carriers and take them into the bathroom and i’m looking around - Where is Bascom? its a tiny room - but he is nowhere to be seen. i’m checking behind the toilet, in the shower, behind the door - he is nowhere. Meg comes in with Ceres and i’m in panic mode and we are both looking around and suddenly i notice just a shadow, above Meg’s head. It is an internal bathroom - with a skylight about 10 feet up —- and just below the skylight, at about 8 1/2 feet there is a ledge. and there is Bascom
now our family is, ahem, vertically challenged, but thank goodness, Meg’s good friend Jamie is there and Jamie is gloriously over 6′ tall and willing to hop up on a chair and get him down.
The rest of the trip (except for when the airline checkin folk told me i had to take the cats out of the carriers in the middle of the chaos that is the airline terminal so they could prove they were just cats) went great.
we followed up by taking trains to DC, NYC and then along the northern border of the US to the West coast and finally home. It was a great trip —- but BOY AM I BEHIND ON EVERYTHING!!!
hope everyone is having a good spring/beginning of summer - and sure hope I get my act together and get some stuff done before NIADA in july!
oldoni February 29th, 2008
bug was so much fun, i started another…
(ok, is it possible i’m avoiding doing all the sanding and cleaning and molding and casting on bug?
nahhhhhh - never….)
about 8 inches (with 1 inch heels! )
oldoni February 19th, 2008
this last week i had planned to be at an ecorche/anatomy class in Scottsdale Arizona… but things didn’t work out. But i still had the week signed out of work as vacation — so i decided to see if I could psych myself into getting an entire sculpt done in that one week. I tend to lose interest or focus and spend more time surfing the web than sculpting when i have days off — i need to break myself of that!
so i set myself a goal to complete a small (around 8″) ball jointed doll in 7 days. It was surprising what took overly long, and what went well. Drawing a concept drawing so i could map out the joints just about did me in and took up most of the first day. (ok, actually - work called and I went into work for 5 hours, so the drawing took up most of what remained of that day) —- while the elbow and knee joints actually went quickly when i forced myself to stop telling myself I couldn’t do them - and just sat down and squished the clay.
so anyway - here are pics of bug —– 10″ fully functional bjd in grey superfirm sculpy.
a little too cute - but i’m happy with how he/she works…
oldoni January 21st, 2008
not thinking of him as a basilisk anymore. he turned out kind of sweet and ineffectual.
In the Shadows
Art by Pat Lillich.
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