Sex and the City Updated

I remember not being impressed watching the pilot episode but a friend promised that it would get better. It did, and I was hooked mostly by the fashion worn by the actresses on the show as well as the locale. Even though I lived in NYC at the time, I was struck by how lovely the show made my hometown looked. I was always under the impression that NYC, for the natives anyway, was more Law and Order than SATC. I knew people who moved to NYC because of the show and boy, were they disappointed…that is, the ones who weren’t wealthy enough to actually afford to live in Manhattan were. The show was a little candy treat at the end of a long work day and I was happy to paint a set depicting a happy time in my life…about ten years ago. I never got around to updating it until recently when a request came.

How much I’ve learned over the course of a decade! The buyer liked my original version, but wanted it updated except for the costume choice. Instead of painting on the massive corsage on Carrie’s dress, I found some crepe paper and silver gilded papers and made an actual one!

The original, painted 10 years ago.

The updated version, 10 years later.

The buyer had a wonderful idea of featuring a pair of shoes for the last “doll.” I had originally thought about tossing in a shoe charm and calling it a day but something kept gnawing at me until I sat down and ordered a pair of Barbie knock off stilettos. The simple pumps from my childhood was hard to find, or that I had to buy them in bulk, so I settled for a buckled model and modified it with my good ol’ X-acto knife. A few coats of paint and some beading later, a pair of Manolo Blahnik featured in the SATC movie was born. It didn’t look done, however, until I was able to create the labels in the smallest font possible and stuck it inside the shoes. I hope it won’t be another 10 years before I make another SATC set!

I Got You Babe

Every now and then a good friend of mine will come to me with a project and I will always say, “I got you, Babe.” These are people who know me so well that they possess an unwavering confidence in my ability to create seemingly impossible tasks. I am grateful for that, of course, but it still gives me a bit of a spaz attack every now and again, like this daunting Cher set. 

I love Cher, her music, her acting, her daring fashion choices, her attitude, her incredible figure…basically,  her overall presentation. When people are having a freakout around me, I’d channel MY inner Cher and tell them to: “Snap out of it!” This is why I happily agreed to paint the set, not only because the friend requesting it is one of the best I’ve got, but also I. LOVE. CHER. 

Creating the headdress for the first doll was daunting. I initially thought I could make one out of this furry pelt thing baby photographers use as a prop. When it arrived I immediately rejected it and thought long and hard for an alternative material. I finally found it in my box of papers—vellum! They’re durable and can be snipped to the right shape and size easily. It is also a great excuse to check out the new Office Works that just opened near me. I happily beelined for the markers section as soon as I was let loose inside. I bought 5 markers, one of them a whopping $9.89, but it was the only one that created the sort of patina that I was after without weighing the vellum down or casting a weird purplish sheen. Then I boosted up the volume with some cut up foam sheets. 

My friend and I kicked around the idea of whether or not to include Cher’s exes. For me it’s a resounding yes because I so very desperately wanted to paint Sonny Bono. We decided they will be of equal size and fit into the Aerobics Era Cher. Gregg Allman was another one I didn’t mind painting. Years ago I saw the Allmans Brothers Band at the Beacon Theatre, and I cannot tell you anything about it except there was a lot of aromatic fog and also a drum solo that went on for about 3 days. 

This set is a gift for THE ultimate Cher fan, according to my friend, because she wants to give him something to help him to “snap out of” the doldrums he is currently in. I hope it does the trick!

Let Them Eat Cake (2022 Edition)

I’ve only ever done 2 other Marie Antoinette sets before. It kills me that I don’t have the time to do more. Then, last year, I said to myself, let’s make another one…while eating cake! Well, the cake part I ate plenty of, but actually sitting down to make this set was almost impossible.

But I did it! It took a little over a year and it’s finished. While working on other sets I thought about making an actual wig for the main doll and chose a material to manipulate in such a manner that I’ve never done before. There were a lot of trials and errors–from ordering the wrong size ribbons to figuring out how to secure it in such a way that the coils don’t loosen as well as experimenting with the different types of glues.

One of my favourite aspects of this set was the ship on the first doll. The original piece was forged in metal, then duplicated via computer and projection imaging wizardry and then 3-D printed to the size of my specification. BoBo Babushka is utilising a combination of old school painting and 21st century tech. It’ll be while before I can even think about making another version, but I can dream, can’t I?

A Double Lebowski Christmas Ornament/Nesting Doll Set

I resolve to do a holiday themed set every new year and then these plans would have to be abandoned by mid-April because of the volume of work I’m slammed with. There are still such projects languishing in my supply closet because I just don’t have time to tend to them. But those days are over! I started working on one of the many holiday projects immediately after Christmas ‘21 and the first Christmas set is finished by mid-March! I am extremely pleased by my get-with-it-ness this year. 

This is an idea that slapped me so hard across the face that I had no choice but to start planning and working on it as soon as I could. It may not be 100% Christmas themed, but it can be hung all year round. I ordered these globe-shaped nesting dolls on a whim, not sure what I was going to do with it, but all the moving parts in my head fit into place and here is a double nesting doll set: One is a standard Big Lebowski character set that can nestle into each other, the other are the bowling balls corresponding with the characters used in the movie. The fun part about this set is that the dolls can also fit into their bowling balls, thus creating a bit of a meta feel to it, a fun gift to give to someone who loves bowling or is constantly high.

Pen15

It took me a while to sit down and watch Pen15. The premise was interesting enough. It’s about two middle school girls navigating through one of the most awkward time of their lives. That sounded like every other show on TV except the two girls are adult actresses with a bunch of 13 year olds as their classmates. That right there is comedy gold. The show was very cringey but in a nice nostalgic sort of way. My god, was I ever that awkward in middle school? It’s actually a good thing I found myself in a Catholic school at that time so fashion faux pas wasn’t an issue except I managed to even geek out on that front. At my mother’s insistence I wore a pair of orthopedic shoes that was identical to the ones my ex-nun religion/homeroom teacher wore and she dressed like a middle aged man living out of his mother’s basement. On picture day, also at my mother’s insistence, I wore one of her vintage ensemble that resembled one of Fraulein Maria’s outfits when she first arrived at Captain von Trapp’s home and was told that she would have to get a whole new wardrobe. Only one boy made fun of me then, and he wasn’t even mean about it because he’d only just asked me to draw the Guns n’ Roses logo on his binder so he didn’t want to risk offending me, or charging him money. Looking back, being the weirdo transfer student sporting bad hair (well, it was the 80’s so technically no one’s hair was really all that), braces, and these unironically awful nerd glasses, my classmates were kind/indifferent to me. I was never invited to parties, which was fine since I’d gone to a few at my old school and wasn’t impressed with the usual of pinning tails on donkeys games or Carvel’s ice cream cakes. It also helped that I met my BFF there, who was introduced to me as soon as I revealed my name. I stared at this girl with short hair, a complete antithesis of what an 80’s style bouffant was, and was told that she and I shared the same first name. Later in the week, from my bedroom window, I saw her walking to her house, which was right behind my own and after that we were friends for life because we not only shared the same classroom, the same name, lived in the same neighbourhood, but we had the same nerdy taste in Broadway and TV shows, movies, literature and so much more. She is my Anna and I am her Maya, except we never got into New Kids on the Block or other trendy tweenage things. We were watching Murphy Brown together and making up stories involving murder, madness and mayhem with our Barbie dolls and taking photos of each other in various costumes like we’re characters in a community theatre. Nevertheless, Pen15 was a nice trip down memory lane.

Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone

Unfortunately all the photos of us in our youth are at my Mom’s house. This is a fairly recent one of us as adults. You can see we still haven’t mastered the art of taking selfies. Also her husband took advantage of our camera ineptitude and photobombed us.

The Hours

Like a lot of sets that I paint, this one was suggested by the buyer. “The Hours” is something I wouldn’t have thought to paint on my own and I’m glad I got to do so. My father had passed away two years ago around this time so I try to stay away from tear-inducing literature and films and I chose not to watch this movie before painting it. I did have to look at some clips in order to get a few details right and what I saw was horrifying in the sense that it made me sad, not in a delicious jump scare sort of way.

I remember seeing Nicole Kidman winning an Oscar for her role as Virginia Woolf and thinking, good for you, gurrl!

This set was commissioned while I was juggling close to 27 other orders at the same time with more still pouring in so it had been pushed back to the end-of-the-work-night slot where I only had about 45 minutes to an hour to paint it.

I could’ve chosen a simpler dress for Virginia Woolf/Nicole Kidman, but decided to challenge myself by painting her floral print outfit. The dress took me an entire third season of “You” to paint (that’s right, I measure how long it takes to work on a doll by movie/TV air time) and then some. It’s actually quite therapeutic rendering the tiny flowers.

As with a lot of pieces that I do requiring long periods of time, I feel a little lost now that it is finished. But there are some new and interesting sets to tackle so this feeling won’t last too long!

The Goonies Extension

Way to ring in a new year with this new Goonies set! I’ve always wanted to expand this one, adding in the girls, maybe some baddies, but this will do! In this version I got to paint Brand (the pre-super hunky Josh Brolin, not that the teenage version of him isn’t cute, but my tastes, such as my age, have matured), Mama Fratelli (and oh my goodness was she a treat-and-a-half to paint!), and One Eyed Willy.

I absolutely love making a big set for the new year so this one fits the bill. There are so many interesting projects percolating in my head, desperate to bubble over, so I’ve been busier than ever in the ol’ sweatshop hammering it all out. There’s no such thing as transitioning smoothly into any new year, but I have made a resolution to completely filter out any distractions and unpleasant things, plan waaay ahead, finish all the projects I’ve started that’s simply languishing in the corner of my closet somewhere for the last few years, and crank out as many projects as I can in 2022! What are your resolutions for the new year?

It’s a Wonderful Life

This Christmas classic had been on my holiday wish list for a long time now, but I haven’t gotten around to painting it until this year! Someone had ordered this back in June as a present and it really got me into the Christmas spirit as my Christmas season usually begins at the end of August. Plus, it was winter in Australia then so the chilly weather, the annual flu shot, and the fact that I’m painting one of the few major Christmas movies ever made really puts me in the yuletide mood!

(Large to small) George Bailey present and George Bailey past, Mary Hatch, Clarence, and little Zuzu holding an angel.

Selena Revisited

The last time I painted Selena I felt a bit sad. Her untimely and unnecessary death hadn’t made an impact on me at the time, but whilst painting her and learning about her enormous talent and the legacies she’s left behind at such a young age did. I had hoped the sadness had lessened this time around but it didn’t. What a shameful waste of a life. I hope I did this subsequent set of Selena dolls justice. It’d been an insanely hectic and busy time in the studio so I looked forward to sitting down after a long night of painting with beads and glitter to work on the outfits. This version had two new additions: One of her in her luminous Grammy Awards gown and one in a cow print outfit, which I had a ton of fun recreating.

The last time I made this set I thought it might be fun to add a little Grammy award statue except there had been some technical difficulties. We tried it again for this set (by we I mean my husband, as I’m not allowed to touch his computer and 3D printer due to a series of Bad Luck that follows me whenever I’m exposed to technological machinery of any kind) and I consented to printing it a bit larger, which is too large for my liking, but with the fiddly bits like the arm there’s nothing I can really do about it, as it kept snapping off. I also did a little editing for this piece after completion. My customers prove themselves to be excellent art directors, as I often do not pick up little details. I was all too happy to add the little thumb ring and a band aid to Selena in the purple outfit!

Field Museum

As someone who used to play the piano, the importance of warming up the ol’ fingers before each practice session was drummed into me from the beginning. It’s the same with art. I can’t just dive into my nightly babushka-ring session. More often than not, I have very little time to indulge in anything outside doll painting so I thought, hey, I’ll use the warm up session to make something different. I’ll paint on paper! I’ll paint fun stuff! I’ll paint beetles! I so want to erect a spot in my house into to a monument of natural history findings. In order to paint bigger bugs, I thought I should start with small ones first. Eventually I will paint one where I’ll have to build the canvas in my backyard because it’s so big.

This is a cigarillo box I outbid 40 ebay users for back in the 90s. It was my first time bidding on anything so I was extremely pleased to have won it.. I also won a subsequent box for the same product except it’s a little longer and I have no idea what I’ve done with it. This one, however, came with me during my vagabond days so it’s lived in several different countries and half a dozen apartments, bedsits, and houses. It and I have a long, storied past and I want to use it for something significant, not just something I stow paperclips, pilfered fun sized lollies or tampons in.

It opens up to reveal a series of five drawers!

During my first sojourn to Sydney, I visited the Australia Museum and was thrilled to find that the patrons are allowed to open drawers and observe the many taxidermied specimens not on display. I pored over just about every single drawer available and lingered the longest in the entomology department because I LOVE insects. I’m not thrilled about having them hanging out in my house, but I’m more than happy to share my garden with them. 

So, nearly 25 years of possessing this majestic box, I decided to use it as a mini taxonomic display for selected varieties of beetles. There are so very many to choose from! I paint one or two each night before work. It’s so satisfying to knock one out within a short time span, as I usually spend days, weeks, and sometimes even months on one project. 

This small endeavor took about 6 months to complete, as I wasn’t able to actually paint it every day. But I have devoted each day to it, be it looking up beetles to paint, sketching it out, planning it, finding the right shade of green or blue and researching the best technique to paint at such a small scale or the best patina to apply to it. I am a little sad that it’s finished but I am planning on the next one, having found the next best box to house the yet-to-be-painted beetles. In the meanwhile, I really need to catch up on all the Christmas orders!

This is just to give you an idea of how small it is!

I initially had a hard time painting these beetles, as the subjects were tiny and I was in dire need of new glasses. Once that was taken care of, everything came together! I made a little stop motion video, but it cannot be displayed here. You can watch it on my Instagram account: bobobabushka

It’s hard to tell from the photos, but these bugs are actually somewhat tactile! I puffed it out so you can feel the bump as you run your (hopefully clean) hands over each and every single bug.