Monday, January 25, 2010

i have recently become a fan of sewing



after i made my bison puppet costume i was bit by the sewing bug real hard. i made two hand puppets (pics in older post), modified a giant stuffed polar bear into a halloween costume/vest (still have to fix the hood) and now i'm making my own stuffed animals. this one here is the beginnings of a coyote. i really have no idea how to make patterns so i pretty much just plan out how i want it to look in my head, make a few sketches on paper and hope everything works out in the end. so far it's working out just great.




this is a black lab i made for my sister. the body is a little long so it can be used as a pillow. my sister helps raise service dogs and they mostly use labs for that sort of thing. the most recent lab she helped raised happened to be a black lab and we all got kinda attached to him so i thought she would appreciate a black lab stuffed animal/pillow. and she does :]





i made this one for myself. he looks like a terrier or something but he is actually a little polar bear. his head is super floppy so it can turn in all sorts of directions. i think a moveable head on a stuffed animal adds a lot to the livelyness and emotion of the toy.




i think googley eyes add a lot too!

bunny and bear



i first drew these characters at cal arts in 2005 during a 24 hour sound design session for "robot be-bop" with my friend debbie. we did it straight through and it was probably somewhere around the 16 hour mark (probably awake for almost 24 hours already) i doodled these two in my sketch book. i became obsessed with the bunny and the bear and created multiple universes and stories for them, all of which failed to develop fully.

i have drawn hundreds to thousands of small, random characters in my sketchbooks, on napkins and the undersides of tables but i can't remember ever being so wrapped up in any of my characters as i have with these two. in a way, they haunt me. i have no idea what it is about them, but i absolutely love my unnamed bunny and bear.

these were sculpted in 2005 or 2006 with the intent to make a mold out of them but i got carried away and decided to paint them as soon as they were cooked. they have quite a few battle wounds as a result of my semi-nomadic lifestyle.