Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

During the Easter weekend, I have been doing some" catch up" work, completing some orders and finishing a little art doll I started a week ago as well as eating a chocolate Easter egg or two and going out to dinner  and movies with friends  - perfect weekend!  Here is my little Forest Friend, rescuing a nest of eggs at Easter... and here are the basic steps: 1. Have a good friend to inspire, motivate and help... Bobbi (Lambo Art) explaining anatomy and armature 2. Make an armature from wire and check the proportions against an anatomy chart. Wire armature, secured with insulation tape.   3. Flesh out the armature by covering with lots of  aluminium foil. Armature covered with foil   4. Make foil bases/ armatures for head, hands and feet Foil armatures  5. Cover and sculpt with polymer clay. I used Sculpey" Living Doll" and I made two pairs of hands because the first lot looked like lobster claws!   Cure in an oven at 130 ...

Recently I have been working on quite a few dolls for various swaps and blog challenges, but especially the samples for the Creative Retreat 2011   where I will be offering a workshop "It's A Wrap" - wrapped armatures made from discarded and found objects. Candy Flossie ( pictured above) is the result of wrapping a polystyrene ball and timber armature with a sample piece of wet felting , some fabric, recycled paper ribbon from a present, adding a polymer clay face, and swirly beads, toothpicks and some bright pink paint. This doll started from a bargain box reject snowman like this one below. I didn't like them at all and had no intention of "fixing" them , but somehow gave into the temptation and bought two.  Honestly, who could resist this for $1? I am unapologetic about the alterations to the first one -  off went the hat, scarf, buttons and shoes and voila- snowman to fairy floss girl!  Candy Flossie is now ready for the Blog Party at P...

It's a Wrap   is  my newly devised workshop to be offered in 2011... wrapped art dolls. During the last couple of weeks, I have been busily trying to create a few samples for the workshop promotion. My ideas behind the concept for this workshop were: 1) make an art doll without a sewing machine; 2) use found objects and 'recycled'and 'upcycled' materials; 3 ) use  one or more wrapping techniques: and 4) include a surprise or something unexpected as part of the doll.  All of the dolls also use polymer clay and some have air dry clay bases as well. And so here is  the first of the samples "Unravelling" - no sewing at all, an armature made from sticks, wrapped with leftover wool, and an old bead sample, and for the unexpected, the doll is starting to be unravelled by a little bird nesting on her head. Sample 2 " Clearing away the Cobwebs" is made the the same way ... This one is my own favourite, although I took ages to make the cobweb. A reworki...