Sawdust Bear Makes Things

I locked myself in all weekend and pretty much did nothing but sculpt(Trish came over Saturday, so I did see another human being). On the bright side, I’m no longer freaking out big time over Wondercon – or at least, I’ve packed my carry-on-size road case about as much as it can be packed, so I’m almost at the point where I can’t actually carry any more work with me anyway.

Here’s some of the monsters I sculpted this weekend.

I freaking LOVE the new Premo colours. I pretty much don’t want to sculpt with anything else. They’re harder to paint, but I’m sure I’ll figure that out soon.

Wondercon in 10 days, freelance deadline(those cats) the day before Wondercon, quite a bit more of Wondercon inventory to get together AND my Real Job deadlines are coming up hard and fast too.

Um, here’s a monster. I made it. His name is Trail, as in snail trail but he’s sort of inspired by nudibranches, coral reefs, banana slugs and snails without shells, which I guess are pretty much just slugs.

How am I doing? Well, I’m fine. I’m stressed out, I work a lot, I have really ambitious projects, and I’m constantly frustrated that even some of my friends still can’t grasp the fact that my art is my second job, and I treat it like one and pay taxes on it. As a result, I’ve lost a lot of the desire to “go out and do things” because going out and doing things has been feeling like an awful lot of obligation lately. As a result of THAT, I’m not sculpting as much as I should because I’m depressed about disappointing my friends. And not sculpting makes me want to just stay home and sculpt more…well, you can see the cycle.

So, there’s that.

Coincidentally, today’s Marlowe expresses pretty well how I feel.

Oh, yes. Wondercon. I’ll be in the Artist Alley as Sawdust Bear, at table 135, although I don’t think knowing the table number will do you much good.

Some of you have asked me photography questions and been disappointed with my answers which tend along the lines of “I really don’t know – my camera works well on auto.” It’s true – I actually know nothing about photography except that if you take 200 pictures, a couple will be okay.

Fortunately, I asked my photographer friend Eron for some macro photography tips and he decided to respond with a four part blog post, because he’s just super informative and helpful like that! He’s up to 3 of 4 as of this posting, and I have only begun to absorb their contents, but if you’re interested in the topic of taking pictures of tiny things and tiny sets, you should certainly read his blog, Curio. Thanks, Eron!

I’ve been working on more little terrarium things because they are fun to make(and no, I haven’t implemented any of the photography tips yet…but I will!).

This one will be at Wondercon(I’m there as Sawdust Bear…I still don’t have a banner, so look for the monsters, tentacles and jars.

Finally got some time to start sculpting again, which is good because Wondercon is…one month away. EEP. I still haven’t figured out how to get everything I need to SF with just my carry on bag; but I’ll figure it out, I’m sure.

I’m slowly working back to the original Specimen 7 concept – back to specimen jars and bad science and tea stained labels. It’s a ton of fun.

Today was productive. I finally figured out what I’m doing with the Specimen 7 storyline after over a year of no more than a very vague idea! But I sat down and drafted the whole story arc for a book today. It’ll be a combination of photographs and Nick Bantockian epistolary short story and it’ll be fantastical and weird and maybe a little bit creepy. I’m looking forward to working on it. I’ve really wanted to work on a project like this for a while(I really adored Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine trilogy), but I sort of forgot that the perfect project for it was the one I was already working on.

I also started finishing this sculpture I started about four months ago too. Here’s a progress picture – he needs a bit more paint and then he’s done!

I made this piece for a friend’s tribute art show. We were mostly just acquaintances with a lot of mutual friends, but she was always delightful and loud and funny and always unforgettable.

Her best friend Shaun told me a story about how she ran into PETA while wearing a pretty garish pink fur coat(she wore fur a lot and pulled it off impeccably). Both her and the coat were fine because after all, bunnies don’t come in pink.

I sculpted Lisa in her sort of AMAZING pink spotted bunny fur coat, surrounded by a pile of adoring bunnies. The show is this Sunday at the Werby Gallery at Cal State Long Beach, if you’d like to come – all proceeds from the show go to Lisa’s memorial scholarship.

I’ll miss her.

I’m totally working on stuff. Really. Actually, I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately, but I know I need to get back to sculpting some monsters and updating my shop soon. I’ve really been enjoying working on things that are NOT monsters lately, though.

Here’s some pictures. This is…pieces from the model I’m building to get together the idea of the mutant vehicle my boyfriend, my friend Scott and I are building for Burning Man this year. I used to be really good at model building, but I no longer have the patience for it.

This other thing is a project I’d rather not be doing…it’s for my friend Lisa’s memorial art show. She was fabulously stylish and wore a lot of fur, and my friend Shaun told me this story involving a pink rabbit fur coat last week. Anyway, it’s her and the pile of unpainted bunnies will be pink bunnies, of course.

Here’s hoping for some inspiration to strike soon! My studio is looking a bit too clean(this is a lie. it is not clean at all…).

Happy New Year! I’m still recovering from the madness of the holiday season and a lot of self inflicted madness(which was very fun).

For 2011, I’m going to plan on doing AWESOME things. And update Marlowe on time too.

I am thanking the USPS in advance for not losing any of the packages I’ve been mailing out in the past few days. Thank you, USPS. Please.

Here’s a recent mutant frog commission I finished. I actually finished a couple of different frog specimens as commissions…i guess frogs are a bigger thing than expected.

And a dead mutant mouse. This one’s on sale at the Etsy shop.

A couple more specimens under the “more”…

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I made this thing for Jason because his work is doing a mosaic thing and gave all employees a card to take home to draw on. I was going to draw our WoW characters being adorable together, but I didn’t have time, so it’s just fanart.

Here it is next to the artbook art I used for reference(It’s WoW’s Cataclysm artbook).

more pictures underneath the more…it’s actually three dimensional!

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