Sawdust Bear Makes Things

So, wanna see how I work?

This is my desk, where most of the sculpting gets done. Oh yes, it is messy.

I built that wood thing in the back as a craft show display, but it honestly didn’t work very well, so now it’s custom specimen shelving. You can see a whole bunch of unfinished ones there.

Awesome things in the picture that are not that relevant to my sculpting: my Stitch dice bag and my porcelain glove mold.

I really love Claussen deli pickles too, and their jars are great.

Here’s a picture of my somewhat girly garage pegboard. I spend more time here than my boyfriend, so I got to pick the paint colours. If the tools look somewhat sparse, it’s because there’s a pile of pliers and screwdrivers sitting on my worktable that need to be sorted out. Hmm – this is somewhat embarrassing – I should have cleaned first.

It does look pretty colour coordinated. Most of my tools are yellow, mainly out of some loyalty to DeWalt power tools, even though there are none in this picture. Turns out red and yellow are pretty common tool colors anyway.

Here is a view of the awesome worktable in my garage. No, I can’t show you the entire work table because it is embarrassingly messy. It’s an awesome 8′×8′ work table, though.

Here’s some of the petri dishes I’m making with resin poured in them.

I really dislike Vlasic pickles, but my boyfriend likes the pickles, and I like the jar.

The blue shape to the left is actually the original sculpt for my Gelatinous Cube.

A few of my dissection pieces(three are new!) are going to be at the $50 Art Show at the Red Loft in Downtown LA this Saturday. Please come by if you’re in the area!

Here’s one of the new pieces that are going to be there!

Here’s some pictures of petri dishes. This is how specimens are grown.

These are pretty fun. The fake agar is resin. By the way – never buy Castin’ Craft clear resin. That stuff is shit. Pay the extra $5 for whatever Smooth-On makes. Given, I have yet to try their crystal clear resin(it does require a scale), but I’m sure that it can’t possibly be as terrible as the Castin Craft stuff. The resin in these dishes is Smooth Cast 326 with no pigments added. The air bubbles are intentional, in the well, the grapes were probably sour kind of way(no really, I actually do like them).

This one is currently for sale at the Maker’s Market, and I’ll be uploading more there and on Etsy this week!

More pictures after the cut!

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…yeah, $50 art. Some of my dissected monster sculptures/wall plaques will be at the $50 Art Show at The Red Loft. It’s an awesome space, and it’s a great way to spend a Saturday evening with really cool artist people and some great affordable art.

Please RSVP to the Facebook event here!
$50 Art Show
Saturday, March 27th, 2010
4:00-11:00pm
440 Seaton Street

A bunch of my ex-coworkers left to start a new site called Gravity – it’s a conversation engine(i think that’s what they call it).

It’s pretty cool. Their mascot is a dinosaur, llama…thing called Amir.

As a warm up exercise I made a little rough sculpt of a Amir figure yesterday – the sculpting only took about 15-20 minutes or so, but then, it’s not a particularly complex shape.

Well, I think he’s cute.

I’m packing up a couple orders today and stopped to think about it…and I still can’t believe that people want to buy my art.

I am amazed and grateful for that.

Another batch of baked specimens-in-progress. The two at the back that look like bugs are gremlins that have microchips embedded in their backs.

Look at my desk! It’s full of monsters!

They’re all in different stages of completion – the two larger green ones are pretty much done, the big pink one is baked and unpainted and the one on the turntable is still squishy and unbaked. There are two small unpainted specimens in the back too. You can also see pretty much the only three tools I use, a mechanical pencil, an x-acto knife and this thing with a small spatula thing on one end and a ball-tip on the other. There’s another one sitting there too, but I haven’t touched it. The white box is what I take all of my pictures in. Eventually, I’ll get or make a lightbox.

I’m using taxidermy eyes for the first time and I think they look REALLY cool. They’re sorta muddied in the picture because I have clayey hands, but I think they’ll look awesome when I’m done.

I feel pretty productive. I’ve already tinkered with the monster sculpt that’s sitting on the turntable, done most of my taxes and I think I’m going to go and make Jason breakfast in bed now. Not bad for 10:39am on Sunday, considering that I usually don’t even get out of bed before noon on a weekend.

The past two weeks from me have been filled with somewhat grueling travel, and I think I’ve seen more snow in the past 14 days than I have in the past 14 years of my life.

I’m pretty much dying to get back to sculpting – I read an article on carnivorous plants in Nat Geo on the plane and now my mind is filled with pitcher plants and sundews and flytraps…

In the meantime, here’s a quick sketch of an earthworm wedding I drew while sitting on the tarmac at LAX for what felt like forever…