𝐌𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐍𝐨𝐬𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐮 𝐕𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐀𝐫𝐭 𝐃𝐨𝐥𝐥

I recently wrapped-up making a Nosferatu vampire art doll inspired by the character from the classic film of the same name. I used reference images from the film and also found some inspiration as I did research about the original film, there was one line that stuck with me that described Nosferatu as vermin-like as opposed to the more debonair portrayals of vampire that we’ve had in later media.

One point where my version of Nosferatu diverges from the film version is that the costumers had given him these long, thick eyebrows, which I found to be kind of silly looking, so I eliminated them from the design. Many modern interpretations of Nosferatu omit them, so I can’t be the only one that feels this way.

This is the final illustration that was created with the vampire art doll. If you would like a print, you can get one here.

It was also fascinating to read that Nosferatu was actually an illegitimate Count Dracula. As many people are aware, Bram Stoker wrote “Dracula” and when he passed his widow, Florence Balcombe, had authority over his works and didn’t authorize a film adaptation of the novel. This didn’t prevent the creators of Nosferatu from going so far as to advertise Nosferatu as adapted from Stoker’s Dracula!

I hope you enjoyed seeing this lurking terror come together! To be the first to know when I launch new polymer clay art videos, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon (but because YouTube's wonky, you can also join the newsletter). Catch all of my videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/thedreamsyndicatearts. You can also find many of the supplies I use in crafting here: https://www.thedreamsyndarts.com/supplies-gear/. Until next time, make believe!

Making Slimy Slug Art Dolls with Resin Slime 🐌

Today we'll be embellishing wooden display bases as we make slimy slug art dolls with resin slime! I'd previously sculpted these polymer clay slug art dolls with super sculpey over aluminum foil armatures, made these handsome display bases, and only recently had the idea of "slug trail" trailing behind them as if the slugs (slowly) made their way up on to the base.

WATCH MAKING SLIMY SLUG ART DOLLS WITH RESIN SLIME 🐌

I'd already given the slugs a thin coating of two part epoxy resin to give the sculpey art dolls a wet sheen look and I used the material again to make the slimy path for the little critters. Since I've had these particular opened bottles of epoxy resin for a few years, this was a great way to use the older materials rather than wasting them. 

Slimy Slug Sculptures

These slug sculptures can slime their way to your home & heart.

Buy a Slug Here

 

To be the first to know when I launch new polymer clay art videos, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon. Catch all of my videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/thedreamsyndicatearts. You can also find many of the supplies I use in crafting here: https://www.thedreamsyndarts.com/supplies-gear/. And sign-up for my newsletter to get the latest studio goings-on! Thanks so much for joining me on this journey and until next time: Make. Believe!

Getting Ready to Show at My First Art Booth! | Art Star Craft Bazaar in Philadelphia, PA

This Saturday I'm taking a leap that I've put off for some time in years past- I'm getting ready to show at my first art booth at the Art Star Craft Bazaar here in sunny, hot, humid Philadelphia! Art Star has been running successful arts and crafts shows for several years in the area and I feel like I'm in pretty good hands. This is a pop-up show, which means it's only one day for a few hours. The first date for it is Saturday, 7/28/18 from 12-5pm.

There's a few reasons I've put off boothing at art fairs, but I think one major one was not feeling like I'd ever had a large enough body of solid artworks to show. I don't feel like you can do this sort of a show without 10-12 images you feel strongly about. There's also a fair amount of start-up costs to running a booth- there's the cost of inventory (and the packaging of said inventory) and the display and booth decor items aren't particularly cheap if you don't happen to have what you need on-hand and want to have a certain level of professionalism to your presentation.

WATCH MY THOUGHTS ON GETTING READY TO SHOW AT MY FIRST ART BOOTH | ART STAR CRAFT BAZAAR IN PHILADELPHIA

Speaking of professional presentation, there's a few people I'd like to thank for inspiring me with best practices, either from watching their content or sending them the occasional frantic Facebook message. I've been following the independent genre artist podcast One Fantastic Week's YouTube content for a couple of years and I think there's few better resources for entrepreneurial artists and they've a great community of like-minded people. I also owe Pete Mohrbacher a beer for recommending El-Co Color Labs- they've produced some really fantastic prints of my art. Crystal Sully, creator of "Untamed Beastiary", was also super helpful in helping me track down a couple of vendors for booth supplies. Rather than have you track Crystal down, I'll list the vendors I've used for booth display.

Craft Show Vendors

• Printing: http://www.elcocolor.net/

• Banner: https://www.nextdaydisplay.com/product/fabric-wrinkle-free/

• Print Bags, Cardboard Backing, & Shopping Bags: https://www.clearbags.com/

I'm doing four of these shows and I'll let you know how they ultimately went- fingers-crossed that it was worth it! To be the first to know when I launch new polymer clay art videos, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon (but because YouTube's wonky, you can also join the newsletter). Catch all of my videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/thedreamsyndicatearts. You can also find many of the supplies I use in crafting here: https://www.thedreamsyndarts.com/supplies-gear/. Thanks so much for joining me on this journey and until next time: Make. Believe!

Greetings & Welcome to the Dream Syndicate Art Dolls

How rude of me- I've yet to properly introduce my YouTube channel. In this video, I do just that by giving folks a taste of what they can expect from The Dream Syndicate Art Dolls with this channel trailer.

WATCH WELCOME TO THE DREAM SYNDICATE ART DOLLS

Throughout my videos, I share the process I use in crafting fantasy art dolls, showing you how I sculpt, paint, build, and paint them. I also show how some of the props are made for a photo shoot and a glimpse of what the photography sets look like for my dimensional art doll illustrations. When I'm not creating videos about making art dolls, I make videos about the arts, whether it's culture or thoughts about what it's like to be a professional artist today.

To be the first to know when I launch new polymer clay art videos, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon (but because YouTube's wonky, you can also join the newsletter). Catch all of my videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/thedreamsyndicatearts. You can also find many of the supplies I use in crafting here: https://www.thedreamsyndarts.com/supplies-gear/. Thanks so much for joining me on this journey and until next time: Make. Believe!

The Devil May Cry with this Devil Art Doll Repair 👹

This devil art doll's name is Diavolo Malvolo and he fits that old wedding tradition of something old, something new, something borrowed, and something new as the blue devil himself is an older work, the illustration's new, I borrowed some dry-rotted wood to make the "cliff" he's standing on, and well, the blue part's pretty obvious, isn't it? In this latest video, I take the devil art doll that's been sitting on my shelf and reveal his dark, disturbing secret... no, it's not that he's a devil- that much's obvious! The secret is this: he has crevice along his horn and ear- he's damaged goods. Over the course of the video I try to repair him, but do I succeed? Watch and find-out good viewer!

 

WATCH DEVIL ART DOLL REPAIR 👹

As you might have seen if you made it to the end of the video (I say in an accusatory voice), I made an dimensional illustration with this handsome devil art doll. If you'd like one to hang on your wall, you can order a print from my Etsy store.

You can bring this handsome devil home from my store.

Just in case you're still in suspense- I was able to repair Diavolo after all through the use of plumber's epoxy and epoxy resin as well as a fresh coat of paint. Huzzah! I hope you enjoyed your chance encounter with the devil! To be the first to know when I launch new polymer clay art videos, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon (but because YouTube's wonky, you can also join the newsletter). Catch all of my videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/thedreamsyndicatearts. You can also find many of the supplies I use in crafting here: https://www.thedreamsyndarts.com/supplies-gear/. Until next time, make. Believe!

BRAMBLING 🌲| Making a Fantasy Art Doll

And finally, a brambling is full born... or is it sprouted from a little acorn? The biology of the little fae creatures aside, this fantasy art doll is completed! All told, he probably took around 16 hours to craft (including accidentally sculpting two right hands for him! Unfortunately, not the first time something like that's happened, I assure you!). In prior videos I shared the process of sculpting and painting him in-depth and in this most recent one, I sew his clothes and show-off a bit of the staged set that went into making the finished dimensional illustration.

Watch Brambling | Making a Fantasy Art Doll

I enjoy characters with fanciful clothing and while the brambling's clothes are meant to have a utilitarian, rustic look to them, I was able to add some visual interest with the fae creature's asymmetrical, tattered cloak. The clothing was distressed by wrinkling, staining with acrylic paint, sanding, and then hand-sewing the fabric directly on to the art doll's body. I usually make a point of distressing an art doll's fabric as i like the viewer to imagine the secret life that the art doll has when they're not around. A life with a bit of mystery and magic's a better one! Lastly I set-up the scene by arranging fabric, vines, butterflies, and even used some small tree stumps! I photographed this mixture of found objects and then spent a little time post-producing the image in Photoshop.

Here's the finished dimensional-illustration:

You can find a print of this illustration here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/601530840/brambling-fey-fantasy-fine-art-85x11?ref=listings_manager_grid

I hope you enjoyed exploring this magical fey creature as much as I have! To be the first to know when I launch new polymer clay art videos, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon (but because YouTube's wonky, you can also join the newsletter). Catch all of my videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/thedreamsyndicatearts. You can also find many of the supplies I use in crafting here: https://www.thedreamsyndarts.com/supplies-gear/. Until next time, make believe!

Painting the Brambling | Painting a Fantasy Creature Head

Now that the brambling's head is sculpted to my liking, it's time to lay down some paint! When painting a fantasy creature head, it's actually kind of important to ground yourself in realism because bramblings are elusive in the wild! I had to do the next best thing and bring a couple of tree branches into the studio. Who'd have thought realism's the best strategy when painting a fantasy creature head? By looking at this tree branch I could observe that it was largely a warm grey tone with moments of green and brown on it rather than that iconic brown Crayola crayon that we might all instantly imagine.

 

Watch the Brambling Head Be Painted with Acrylics Here

I used a range of earth-tones in painting the fey creature's head- siennas, umbers, ochers, and greens with touches of grey tones to dull-down the pigments. I also painted the head generally lighter than I would have naturally due to the fact that I was about to embark on trying my hand with an ink wash technique...

EXPERIMENTING WITH INK!

ACRYLIC INK

In painting this head, I tried a technique that was new to me: using an acrylic ink wash with dark toned ink. I had carved a lot of bark texture all over the brambling and I wanted a way to darken the recessed areas that didn't involve my painstakingly painting in dark tones and then carefully trying not to undo this work as I painted-in lighter tones. Before I used the technique on the actual fantasy art doll head, I tested on scrap sculpted piece I had (who'd have thought I was doing myself a favor when I accidentally sculpted two right hands for this art doll?!). Admittedly, I still feel like I can do a better job at highlighting sculpted details with this technique, but overall, I'm happy with the outcome.

If you would like a print of the Brambling final image, you can purchase it HERE.

I hope you enjoyed exploring this magical fey creature as much as I have! To be the first to know when I launch new polymer clay art videos, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon (but because YouTube's wonky, you can also join the newsletter). Catch all of my videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/thedreamsyndicatearts. You can also find many of the supplies I use in crafting here: https://www.thedreamsyndarts.com/supplies-gear/. Until next time, make believe!

What's With #ArtVsHero?

If you spend time lurking artists on Instagram or Facebook or are an artist yourself, you may have seen #artvshero going around. The hashtag started with students of SVS Learn, which was founded by Jake Parker and Will Terry, and is a way for artists to see how they stack-up when surrounded by their art heroes. An artist places their work in the center of a 3-by-3 square grid and literal surrounds their work with the artwork of their influences.

Watch a Discussion on Art Versus Hero Here

I first found-out about this creative exercise on the fantasy/independent artist podcast One Fantastic Week when hosts Pete Mohrbacher and Samuel Flegal had Will Terry as a guest. And I spent some time thinking about it, I found that I'm as influenced by collaborative arts like stop-motion and film design as I am by individual artists and if you've followed any of these artists, there's a through-line, between many of them.

Watch the One Fantastic Week Interview with Will Terry Here

 

My Art Versus Hero Grid

 

Going across each row, the artists (or production companies) are: 

Rednose Studio (an independent artist), Brian Froud, Rankin/Bass Productions, Laika, myself, Tony Diterlizzi, Jim Henson Company, Brom, and Dave McKean. I try to take little bits and pieces of inspiration from all of these wonderful artists with myself acting as a filter. This is by no means an exhaustive list of artists that have influenced my work- I also draw inspiration from many, many more fantastic artists.

Brian Froud worked with Jim Henson films to design the characters for Labyrinth and the Dark Crystal and I know these films were hugely influential on Tony Diterlizzi as early in his career he dreamed of working for Jim Henson. Rankin/Bass produced stop-motion films throughout the 1960's and 70's and it would be easy to see their work informing later animation studios like Laika or the work of Rednose Studio. I love the work of both Rednose Studio and Dave McKean because they've both shown themselves to be near limitless in their process to visually story tell. I also owe Rednose Studio a debt of gratitude for raising the bar for dimensional-illustration! There have been traditional photographed three-dimensional picture books in the past, but they had the unfortunate ability to be unintentionally unnerving (a college friend had showed me a "Goldilocks & The Bears" picture book from decades ago that was nightmare inducing).

To be the first to know when I launch new polymer clay art videos, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon (but because YouTube's wonky, you can also join the newsletter). Catch all of my videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/thedreamsyndicatearts. You can also find many of the supplies I use in crafting here: https://www.thedreamsyndarts.com/supplies-gear/. Until next time, make believe!

Making a Brambling 🌲 | How to Sculpt a Fantasy Creature Head

Bramblings are fey creatures that wander the forest floor looking for mischief to get up to or something good to eat. They can helpful to a lost wanderer or a nightmare to those that break some esoteric woodling taboo. The brambling has been living in my sketchbook for some time and I'm glad to see it finally come to life. I see them as a species rather than any one individual creature and being somewhat wild and unpredictable.

Watch a brambling get crafted here:

This fantasy polymer clay sculpture was crafted with Sculpey Medium Blend, which is a mixture of Sculpey's regular and firm variety, and was my first test with that particular clay (Super Sculpey beige being my "go-to: polyclay). While I found it pleasant to work with, I thought it had a pretty similar consistency to my regular clay. At some point I'd like to experiment with Sculpey Firm and see how that handles. I really could have stood to use a firmer clay since the oh so thin branches are a very delicate aspect of this art doll sculpture. I could see trying Firm or trying my hand at Monster Clay, which doesn't require baking in the oven since it's a two-part epoxy.

I spent a lot of time during the sculpting process creating the bark-like texture of the creature, smoothing-out and trying to create the delicate lines of the branches. I also sculpted tiny clay-like hands. I typically craft art dolls with poseable paper mache hands, but in this case I didn't think I'd be able to get the jagged texture of the bark with such delicate material.

If you would like a print of the Brambling final image, you can purchase it HERE.

A brambling in it's natural environment.

I hope you enjoyed exploring this magical fey creature as much as I have! To be the first to know when I launch new polymer clay art videos, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon (but because YouTube's wonky, you can also join the newsletter). Catch all of my videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/thedreamsyndicatearts. You can also find many of the supplies I use in crafting here: https://www.thedreamsyndarts.com/supplies-gear/. Until next time, make believe!

MAKING A ST. GEORGE ART DOLL ⚔🐉

In this part of the process of making a St. George art doll, the poseable doll's made from a variety of mixed media. Most of the materials your as likely to find in a hardware store as you are an art supply or hobby shop. The armature consists of twisted aluminum wire, aluminum tubing in the neck and used at the forearms, a length of steel wire to give the figure stability and allow it to anchor into a set or display base, and plumber's epoxy. The body's massed-out with upholstery foam and then clothing's sewn around the art doll.

Watch Part 5 in the St. George & the Dragon Piece | MAKING A ST.  GEORGE ART DOLL ⚔🐉:

An art doll's neck doesn't need to be reinforced with the aluminum tubing, you can typically just drill right into the clay if you'd like, but the way I design my characters, I like them to have thin necks because that's the way I tend to draw figures- I like lanky, gawky, attenuated characters. If I were to make a character's neck as thin as I do without putting in the tubing and drill into it, the backed polymer clay would likely crack and crumble around the drill bit.

Once the aluminum and steel wire are all twisted into place, they're secured with plumber's epoxy that's molded into a form to create a cylinder shaped chest and smaller oblong cylinder for the pelvis, which all takes about an hour to set (if you were handling the plumber's epoxy more vigorously, you might want to give it a day). From there, I use the figure's contours to sketch-out a front and back form out of the upholstery foam and cut it out with pair of scissors. These front and back pieces get attached to the plumber's epoxy with a resin based epoxy. Lastly I sketch-out the amount of fabric I'll need to sew the clothing, leaving a bit of a seam allowance. Ordinarily, it's a good idea to use lighter weight fabric, but for the look of the chain-mail armor, I used a heavier upholstery weight fabric that was kind of a pain to work with. The process of making St. George art doll probably took a couple of full work days, not including the time I spent sketching-out details or gathering materials.

If you want to make the imaginary a reality, be sure to subscriber on YouTube!

If you want to be the first to know when I launch new polymer clay art videos, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon (but because YouTube's wonky, you can also join the newsletter). At present, I am launching new videos Saturdays at 2pm EST and I will keep this information up-to-date on my YouTube channel's banner and "about" section here:  https://www.youtube.com/thedreamsyndicatearts.

Sculpting St. George 🐉

When sculpting St. George, I wanted a younger interpretation of our hero. Just about every time I'm sculpting an art doll, I begin with sketches and for this piece I did a few quick studies from teenage aged boys- some of the reference pictures came from Google image searches and some from this great book of Norman Rockwell's depictions of childhood. I also spent spent some time looking at prior depictions of St. George in medieval and renaissance art.

Watch Part 4 in the St. George & the Dragon Piece | Sculpting St. George 🐉:

I wanted to capture a sort of frightened, panicked expression and I was somewhat thinking of Kevin McCallister from "Home Alone", you know, the shaving cream, "Aaahhhhhhhhhh!" scene. My idea for the finished piece of art is to create an image that references the legend of St. George and the Dragon, but to also convey the concept that the dragon isn't nearly as threatening as George thought and it was his imagination making the dragon more terrible than he thought.

If you want to make the imaginary a reality, be sure to subscriber on YouTube!

If you want to be the first to know when I launch new polymer clay art videos, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell icon (but because YouTube's wonky, you can also join the newsletter). At present, I am launching new videos Saturdays at 2pm EST and I will keep this information up-to-date on my YouTube channel's banner and "about" section here:  https://www.youtube.com/thedreamsyndicatearts.