#busted out this doodle because the mental image of him just sitting here enjoying the day wouldn't leave my head

[muzzlemouths]

What kinds of textures would Lost In Transmission Eclipse be most fond of? What would their Perfect Day look like?

Ohhhh this is such a fun question!

Eclipse would be indifferent to textures like brick, carpet, and plastic especially, whereas natural textures like tree bark, grass, and stone would have them perplexed, and it would be a struggle to get them to come back inside again. They would spend hours at the local park, sat toddler style and pulling up grass just for kicks, picking flowers to show y/n and staring with childlike fascination at the ants that run up the nearby tree.

Don't forget to give your television cryptid proper enrichment!

[brokenmusicboxwolfe]

On a photo of a not exactly human face I sculpted....

labratbren said:                                                                                                                            What do you do with them when they are done? Do you ever post pictures of the finished product? 

Ah, well, um....short answer? Nothing.

Here’s the longer answer (VERY long)....

While I was always drawn to sculpting, I really didn’t sculpt growing up. 

I mean, I tried to use clay I dug out of the ground, drying it in the sun, when I was tiny. Naturally it crumbled except for this lump of a head I still have. In Kindergarden the art teacher had his own kiln and let us use the scraps left over from the pots he had us make. I still have a loop armed alien and creature head I made, but he left with his kiln the next year. The dough art they had us make in second grade was gone by the next year, ‘cause this buggy and humid climate doesn’t agree with it. My parents gave me modling clay, but I hated it. I wanted something that would “stay”. 

But everyone acted like sculpting was hard, so maybe I wasn’t missing out. 

Then one day, when I was 19 or so, my hands got bored. Anyone would have laughed if I’d said I was bored right then. I had a book open to one side of me, a magazine on the other, as I went back and forth reading both. I was also  listening to music AND watching the movie The Brothers Karamazov at the same time. I have this problem where I always feel like I should be doing more, and when I am doing something I get itchy to be doing something else. Like my brain isn’t fully occupied even if I’m really enjoying whatever. That day my hands needed something to do, and there was this block of clay left over from a project one of Pop’s projects (a river system display, I think) It was just sittin’ there on the porch so....

And it turned out sculpting was easy! I mean, maybe not art bit doodling around having fun making faces. Do NOT be intimidated by sculpting! It comes so much more easiy than trying to convert our 3D world into some 2D drawing. Seriously, try drawing a nose head on! But toss on any wedge on a sculpted face and you have a nose...

Ok, maybe I just am bad at drawing! But I really do wish more people would try sculpting.

Anyway, the clay was another dead end, but it did inspire me to hunt for something I could “make stay”. And that something was sculpey. 

Whenever I was certain I would have the place completely to myself for a full hour I’d go stand out on the ramp behind the house and sculpt. It wasn’t too often, what with the house also being the office of the family business and my family being the sort of close one that did everything together. I couldn’t sculpt and be watched. All I needed was an our because I sculpted quickly. In an hour I’d have a little bust, rough as heck but with some detail I liked.

But then I ran out of places to put my busts in my already overstuffed bedroom. I solved this by just slicing the faces off and just baking them. I could glue magnets to them and line all the edges of my metal bookcases.

I did dabble in other things. I tried a full figure and made a few little stick figures. I sculpted something from Babylon 5 for my brother, mixed my box painting (I used to paint boxes when I had a table) with sculpting for a Discworld box for Mom, Easter bunnies for my parents, magnets for everyone, Christmas ornaments...

When she saw the Christmas tree ornaments my cousin Katharine, dollhouse collector, roped my into making her a doll. She had specific requirements for a 6″ tall Beast in what I gathered were Regency era clothes from her decription. In my ignorance I assumed the doll would have to have a jointed body, fabric clothes and furry fur, which kinda drove me nuts! But somehow I pulled it off! I sculpted a few more of those little dolls (no sewing on these!) as gifts for my parents and brother, as well as a bit of goofing around for myself (I liked my little  Sleestack a couple decades late for little me). But that was that.

Then the weirdest darn thing happened: I was suddenly stricken with a full imaginative block!

I stopped sculpting. I stopped painting boxes. I stopped writing stories. Worst of all I stopped dreaming! I still remember how upsetting that was, this sense of loss. It was like having a part of me paralyzed.  

It lasted years. Terrible years.

When my father became sick right after my irreparable rift with my brother, as I was facing the most terrible external loss of my life, something woke back up in me. Constant, vivid dreams, elaborate epics spiraling through night after night, images and stories that writing didn’t full  satisfy the need to express. I started painting miniature boxes again. Box after box after box....

But no sculpting.

I dunno why I still didn’t sculpt. I just didn’t.

Then my father died.

Pop’s death was a devistating moment. My father. My best friend. When Pop was sick I told him he couldn’t die because I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to. There is a lot of truth in that.  I love Mom dearly, but our brains work very differently. Pop might have been smarter, and his depth of knowledge was certainly mind blowing, but our mental wiring followed a similar eccentric pattern. That said, somewhere along the line my parents and I had become a sort of unit, functioning as one. Think one of those anime giant robots made of smaller ships, Voltron or something. Then imagine it functioning with the head section missing. Five years later we still feel that void.

So anyway, Pop was dead, the family business gone with him, and I was unemployed with no qualifications in a rural area with few job opportunities anyway. This was, and frankly still is, not a good situation. And my cousin Katharine thought she had a solution.

Katharine sent me a letter suggesting I make dolls. She’d shown the doll I’d made her to a dealer who said I had talent, and she sent me a copy of Art Doll Quarterly to show me that my “weird” stuff might have a market...

Honestly I felt inspired by this. I immediately seriously considered it. I’d work a bit bigger than 6″ scale, sculpt the clothes instead of the stress and tedium of sewing, and figure out a way to do ball joints. Because each thing would be unique (until I could teach myself mold making) and letting go of something I make is soooo hard for me, I decided to use the story of one of my painted boxes as inspiration. I’d make wolf people, which I figured would create enough sameness to help me let go, but enough variety to keep me from being bored. I quickly sketched out a reasonable design and got to work.

Obviously things didn’t turn out to be so simple. Sculpting ball joints by hand is fiddly to manage. It would need a bit of experimenting. I could do a head on day, casually. I could do the upper body, arms and waist joint  with a lot of effort another day. A third day would be waist and legs. Fourth day was the hellish threading. I wasn’t set up for safely storing unbaked work in progress, so I had to do these marathon one sitting sculptings on the bodies. Then I’d rest up a few days and just sculpt a few heads.

The ball jointing drove me nuts. So I gave myself permission to not worry about wolfheads, but just sculpt whatever head happened. From the backlog of heads I’d just pick one to experiment with body making. In just a couple months I was making progress.

The first discouragement came with an art show. The county has a sort of art society and they were having a sculpture show. I was scared silly to show my work to anyone, since at that point it was 2014 and I wasn’t even on Tumblr. No one had seen them. Still, when I went to see about entering the lady there was encouraging. I was soooo nervous and tentatively hopeful when I went to the grand opening with Mom amd my cousin Shirley. I was soon deflated. No one seemed to notice my figures. My work was the odd one out anyway in a sea of found object sculptures, colored paper masks and ceramics abstractly suggesting the figural. Also, everyone there knew each other and so no one was talking to me. At one point I did this really sad thing of hovering near my figures in case anyone came near so I could sorta maybe get them to notice them....

When the show ended a few weeks later the lady very nicely said at least a couple school children had liked weird figures, ‘cause, you know, kids like that fantasy stuff.  I definitely should sculpt a lot bigger and maybe use terra cotta instead....

Yeah. I felt my stuff was crap. I was crap. Why had I ever thought anyone would like my crap? Heck, I’d thought I’d at least find a club I could join, belonging, friends....

But, I kept at the doll making experimenting, crap or not. That winter it was too cold for much sculpting in my unheated house, but I could work on trying to figure out how to paint them....

Then life happened don’t ya know. At first I thought it was a temporary break while I dealt with crisis after another. I kept sculpting heads, strictly sculpting a head a day (still just an hour each)....until the spreading collapsed floor situation forced me to move the box I’d made for storing the bodiless heads out. And that was that for doll making.

Still, I kept sculpting. I went back to just the faces....

And that’s where I am now. I gave up sculpting every day, because I no longer have time. I watch a movie and sculpt. I bake the face and take pics I post on here. I wrap ‘em in tissue and put them in a storage container....

And that’s it.

I don’t do anything with them. I’m not entirely convinced there is any point anymore. My life isn’t going to include free time. Or tables to work on. It has been years after all, and it gets less and less likely I’ll make anything more than a few boxes full of chipped up sculpey faces for the nephews to find when I die. Well, unless they follow my brother’s advice and throw them out unopened! LOL

I sculpt just ‘cause I sculpt. I post pics of them on Tumblr, ‘cause Mom isn’t really all that interested in looking at them. They aren’t ever going to be anything, but I guess if I enjoy making them and someone out there likes looking at them that’s okay. They may be nothing, but that’s something.