Sawdust Bear Makes Things

Hello, new Kickstarter related visitors! It occurred to me that my blog’s been a bit rambly lately, so here’s a quick rundown of what I do besides talk about my cat.

I’m Sawdust Bear, or Shing Yin Khor, and I mostly draw critters, creatures and beasts, although sometimes a person or a food sneaks in. I’m very fond of invertebrates.

I sculpt things like this.

And also like this.

I also draw and paint, usually in watercolours or markers.

Like this.

And like this!

The Center for Otherworld Science is a research organization that finds, identifies and researches these critters. You’ll hear more about them soon. Thank you for coming by!

Hello there! I promised myself I’d blog more this year, and I’m certainly doing so more frequently than “not at all,” but I could probably still manage to do more. The best way to keep track of my art-progress and cat pictures is probably on Instagram – I am ‘sawdustbear’ there. But…definitely stay tuned to my blog if you like listening to me talk(which is of course, surprising, but I really do appreciate it).

This weekend, I made an amaaaazing tomato sauce, which was also ridiculously simple. It’s a Marcella Hazan recipe(The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking), that I got by way of Smitten Kitchen, by way of my friend Erik. Seriously – just those three ingredients. I liked it so much that I drew it. I also ate two servings.

I also did some sculpting, trying to get a head start on my show with Leslie in May. I feel like I’ve finally gotten to that point where I’m planning out my workload well enough that I don’t spend the first couple weeks prior to a show freaking out, and let me tell ya’ – it’s AWESOME. Organization is great, guys! Who woulda thunk.

Anyway, I’ve also been sculpting some ocean critters.

And drawing them too.

And….and…there might be Fattybug 2.0 in the works…

It’s mid January and 77 degrees in Los Angeles, and I’m going to go outside.

Preliminary diorama test is looking quite promising! Wood is unstained, snailbits are very unfinished, and the box isn’t even done yet, but….

My studio smells like sawdust(red oak and pine) and it smells delicious – like work and honey and bark and smoke. It also reminds me that I need to relocate my respirator if I’m gonna cut wood in a closed space. I don’t usually, but it’s raining outside.

When it rains, the snails come out, and I watch them crawling up the walls of my house, and down the driveway, and I hope that the sun doesn’t come back out to bake them against the hot tiles. I wish they would go away, and find a nice forest somewhere. City life is hard for a little snail.

My resolutions for next year are simple – tell more stories. This year, I’m proud of a lot of my work, which were all little parts of this narrative I have about the Center for Otherworld Science, but I also made a lot of things that didn’t really fit, and were just cute and easy to sell.

But – I became a sculptor because it made sense as a way to tell this story(is there a literary term for stories told via objects?). I was writing an epistolary novel that at some point, left the confines of paper, which really excited me, and still does. Anyway, I think it’s a pretty cool story, and I’m going to tell it to you in a wonderfully unstructured manner, but I think it’ll be worth it.

Here are some sketches from the last week.