Nadja’s Creepy Doll

These past few months had been the grimmest I have ever experienced in my life…and I had just lost my Dad in December! Like everyone else, my emotions were a roller coaster ride and I had trouble being my best self on a daily basis. I am fortunate enough to live in a self imposed bubble which I had established a decade or so ago so I was doing okay…until the recent events arose.

As usual, there are always unseen helpers out there getting me through great many trials and tribulations in my life and I cannot thank these people enough for what they’ve said or done for me. One such angel had pointed me toward season 2 of “What We Do in the Shadows” TV series and asked if I could paint Nadja’s creepy doll. I got out from my doldrums long enough to have a look and what I saw made me believe that there is something I can focus on other than doom and gloom. Even though I had other things going on I set the time out to paint Nadja’s creepy doll, who, on the show, was inhabited by a ghost and she was just as droll and funny as the actual Nadja. I love her, I love the show, and I had great fun creating a babushka version!

I mean, how can you not want one of your own?

Beetlejuice Mega Set

I painted a Beetlejuice set a while back after unearthing some lime green batten wool in my supply closet. It had originally been intended for a member of The Misfits from “Jem and the Holograms” set I never got around to painting. Funny how one thing morphs into another in the game of babushkaring. I was asked to paint this nine-piece set of Beetlejuice just as I was about to bury my father so I was pleased to have this to look forward to when I return. I was also pleased that my idea of putting Lydia Deetz in her red wedding gown was okayed. The gown is reminiscent of a dress one of my friend’s bride had worn in a lavish Chinese banquet but of course, at the time, I didn’t have the heart to point that out to her. That wedding had been in Canada and my family had driven all the way up there to attend and had a blast. Painting this set had made me remember one of the many fun family trips we had embarked on and I was grateful to be able to reminisce about it fondly.

This set includes Beetlejuice, Lydia, Adam and Barbara, Delia Deetz, Otho, Charles Deetz, Juno, and an itty bitty Miss Argentina.

She’s only tiny, but I managed to squeeze her name into the sash because I had plenty of practice writing as tiny as I could when I was a kid…a skill my mom had claimed would amount to nothing. Boy, was she wrong on that front!

I Dream of Jeannie

If I ever have the pleasure of being granted a wish, I’d ask for more time. And probably better eyesight. There is just not enough time in the day to do everything I want to do. I had experimented with cutting down sleep and replacing it with 20 minute naps 4 times a day. That didn’t work out too well. I was Zombie-Vampire Irene and had often caught myself sprinkling salt into my coffee. But I came to the realization that my circadian rhythm is vastly different from most people’s and it’s taken me that many years to realize that. It explains why I’m never fully alert until after dinner!

During one of my many late night working hours, I managed to cram in 15-45 minutes of fun painting time in which I’d work on some side projects. This was designed to keep myself interested in painting dolls day in and day out, because without some new and interesting challenges, I would have abandoned the babushka game a long time ago. I wasn’t allowed to watch TV growing up, but since I was also a latchkey kid, my brother and I would happily ignore the restriction by lunging for the TV as soon as we got home from school. Often, after a healthy dose of cartoons and my brother’s wandered off to do whatever big brothers do in the 80s, I’d continue to watch some old reruns of The Brady Bunch, Batman, Bewitched, and, of course, I Dream of Jeannie. I’d been feeling quite nostalgic these days and decided to tackle I Dream of Jeannie because it had always brought me so much happiness. I wanted to work the bottle in, but didn’t want it to be a mini version so the Hubs and I looked at some designs for Jeannie’s bottle and I found a fairly round doll to fashion it into one. The bottom bit wasn’t as wide as I had wanted, but it does keep the original nesting doll aesthetics!

It took several months and some tears of frustration to paint the bottle, largely because, at 3 AM and after a night of going through a heavy painting session, I wasn’t as sharp and with it as I would at 7 PM and kept making some glaringly obvious mistakes. But I would prevail after giving myself a good pep talk and put on some quirky TV shows and fix whatever boo boo I had made.

Painting Jeannie and Major Nelson wasn’t quite as hard, so I left it alone until the bottle was done and dusted. For Jeannie’s hair I had a very clear picture of what I wanted to do. The Hubs designed the fez hat for me with a hole in it so I could easily insert her pony tail through. I remember procuring an excellent facsimile of blonde hair that would do the trick, but I could not for the life of me find it! I tore my studio apart looking for it, only to remember two hours and a huge mess later that it was cast carelessly inside an easy-to-reach supply cabinet. Sheesh. In the end everything worked out and I was able to successfully finish the set without any more crying.

So here it is, a pure labor of love and some misery. Now, you will excuse me as I pull up a few episodes of this old favorite show of mine and sip some unsalted coffee.

My Neighbor Totoro

I’ve done a few Miyazaki based animation characters in the past, but none is as fun as this Totoro set. The idea came about when I received a set of very round dolls several years ago and had every intention of making a set, complete with some Easter egg surprises. But like everything else, life took over and I’ve only just gotten around to making this set. It took a while to hunt down some itty bitty eyes for the Soot Sprites and figuring out the right kind of clay to use to make konpeitō, the little sugar candies Soot Sprites eat. It all came together in the end and here they are!

The problem with making the konpeitō is that they are so darn small! I haven’t had or seen one in years but I’m pretty sure the real ones are a lot larger than what would fit into the last doll. But I managed to find a pair of tweezers with an odd bend that did the trick after several failed attempts! If at first you don’t succeed…look for the right tool that’ll get the job done!

A Christmas Carol

What’s Christmas with the perennial favorite: A Christmas Carol? I’d been eying this one for eons now, having the tale told to me numerous times growing up, so imaging my joy when someone requested one! This is the George C. Scott version. I’ve only ever seen him in “Patton” and “The Firestarter,” the former being one of my Dad’s favorite. I never thought I would ever paint George C. Scott, especially a version wherein he sports mutton chop sideburns!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

What We Do in the Shadows

Sometimes it wouldn’t even occur to me to paint a particular set, no matter how into the movie/TV show I am, unless someone brings it up. It’s something that always baffles me but there we are. I am beyond grateful to Amy for wanting some What We Do in the Shadows dolls made, and not just a single set either, which means I get to fully immerse myself into the world of these vampires of Wellington for a few weeks. Best of all, I get to watch it again and again, and let me tell you, each viewing is a complete and utter treat.

After going through the movie carefully, I chose two of my favorite scenes featuring the vampires plus one with them wearing their “daily garb.”

The cast in these sets are the same but in different orders. There’s Viago, Vladislav, Deacon, Petyr, Anton, The Beast, and of course, Stu.

The Unholy Masquerade always cracks me up largely because it was held in a the most innocuous location possible: Victoria Bowling Club.

There are so many scenes I love (especially when Deacon was doing his dance for the others), but I loved the fact that they have all taken up artistic endeavors to while away their time, something that mere mortals tend to shy away from because our time on earth is so limited.

Well, this is the first time in a long while that I was sad to finish a project. At least I had fun painting it!

Hocus Pocus

It’s the most wonderful time of year in the sweat shop! I usually start planning for my Halloween sets in late August and the hardest thing to do is to put it on a manageable schedule as these are the sort of things I can only paint after the day’s work is done. Fortunately, my husband is on one of his expeditions, leaving me to my own device. His function as a husband is to make sure I get enough food and rest and go out once in a while, but without him here to mother me, I’ve regressed to my art school days (minus the heavy partying) and painting late into the night. The advantage of living this way is that I get my best ideas after 2 AM and it is lovely to harness it and jot it down while alert instead of clumsily pawing at my nightstand for a pad of paper and fumbling for a pen.

For Halloween this year I’ve been tasked with painting one of my favorite all-time horror/comedy movies in the world. This request came right after I had made up my mind to paint another fun and somewhat kid-friendly “Hocus Pocus” so I had the rare treat of working on two Halloween-y sets simultaneously. The idea for “Hocus Pocus” came about largely because I was rooting through my collection of hair and discovered I have the right shade to make hair for Winifred Sanderson. Stop freaking out! When I say I have a box of hair, it’s doll’s hair!

I hadn’t planned on making an Easter Egg surprise for this set, but after reviewing the movie again, I thought it might be fun to toss the spell book into it. The spell book was executed at around 3 am one day and I had been on autopilot at that point so I don’t quite remember painting it, which is always a great surprise in the morning when I see it, or a sad one if it didn’t turn out right.

The Hobbit Revisited

When I was asked to work on The Hobbit again with Smaug as the first doll, I panicked slightly. That had been a hard one to do but then I thought about how I wasn’t exactly thrilled about how the spines turned out the first time, I buckled down one weekend and allowed myself to get carried away. In order to be able to paint the dragon, one must first be the dragon. That’s my new motto, but only because dragons are known for sitting on piles of gold and I wanted to sit on a pile of cookies while I crank this set out.

This set featured three characters from The Hobbit that I hadn’t done before so I was more than pleased to have worked on it.

Since the set I was using had yielded an extra doll, I thought it might be a riot to remove it and stick The One Ring in as an Easter Egg surprise for the buyer. The Precioussss, of course, was most definitely not made of Elfin gold so I was half expecting it to disintegrate as soon as take it out of the packaging. It didn’t, of course, but it would most likely tarnish if it’s worn.

The buyer sent me the loveliest email after receiving it. He said the set had made him cry, and his words had made ME cry, a hardened and jaded former New Yawker who only cries in darkness after watching animal movies. I started painting these dolls during a very emotional time in my life when I had to adjust to living in a new country without any physical support from friends and family. Painting the dolls had been therapeutic and amusing, something I sorely needed then. It made me happy to learn that the photos I shared of these dolls also made other people happy, although the tears people shed after seeing them were always unexpected. I hope that’s a good thing.

KiKi’s Delivery Service

My mother came home from her grocery/video rental run and handed me KiKi’s Delivery Service one day when I was home from college and told me I’d really like it. I had no reason to disbelieve her. As different as mother and I are, she knows me. “The animator is quite celebrated in Japan,” she said and left me to it. Little did I know then that Kiki’s Delivery Service was going to change my worldview completely.

The sweeping landscapes, the storytelling, the insane attention to detail made me a lifelong fan of Hayao Miyazaki and his associates. In the movie the little witch lost her inspiration and found it again when her services was needed. It was inspiring for a young artist like myself and, after I eventually got my own copy, I’d plonk it into the VCR whenever I felt a bit lost in the big wide world of illustration.

This set had been brewing in my mind for years, ever since I found out one of my good friend has named his daughter Kiki after the titular character. It was meant to be a hey-you-have-a-baby present but I felt the timing is a bit off now since the child is currently at pre-school age. Still, it’s something that needs to be done so I spent a bit of time each night working on it. I had hoped the magic had transferred from film into this set while I worked on it. It must’ve done since, weirdly enough, the main doll smelled oddly of baked bread.

As a little “Easter Egg” surprise, I made a broomstick and a radio to pop into the JiJi doll.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Growing up, I thought Mary Poppins was the most magical movie I’ve ever seen. I didn’t exactly have a nanny, but I did have a baby-sitter named Ross who was in high school and had a mullet and a full beard and, upon discovering my mother used to be a piano teacher, made demo tapes of his drum solos and make her listen to it. This experience made me wish I had a magical nanny even more, especially after Ross took off on my brand new dirt bike for a test run before I even had a chance to. Looking back, he’s actually pretty awesome, but when you’re 8 and barely spoke English, you want someone like Mary to come home to after a long tough day at school with a song for every task and not an intense 20 minute drum solo on side A of a cassette tape.

Naturally, I’d want to capture a little piece of my childhood in the form of nesting dolls. Unfortunately, due to the pile and piles of projects sitting in my sweatshop at all times, I had the set boxed at the bottom of the stack for a year, then, after I got a chance to sketch it, it sat there for another year. Yet another year passed before I was able to sit down and study the hats the characters sported in Jolly Holiday and got it printed. The entire set took a shocking 3 months to paint from start to finish since I was only able to work on a tiny bit at a time. But it’s finished and tonight I will have cake to celebrate.

I’d thought originally that the toughest one to paint would be the carousel. It certainly took the longest, but I suppose, after a full day of painting, I daresay I was on autopilot and can’t really remember the entire process!