Day One of the Mississauga Doll Artists Retreat started with a quick lunch then we were off. Our first trip was to our first mystery stop, The Hobby Shop on Dundas in Etobicoke. A hobby shop is a great place to find materials for creating bases to display your dolls on. They have a ton of materials to create trees, bushes, and ground cover, molds for rocks, brass rods, sanding films, paints and the list goes on. I had already bought some green form particles to create very realistic moss on my scouting mission, so on this trip Jolene and I bought some sanding films and some brass rod that I use for inserting my dolls leg armatures into a base so the doll is removable.
We then continued on to our next stop, The Toronto Sculpture Supply shop that a friend from our Etobicoke Doll Artists Group told me about. Here we stocked up on a new product we were going to try out this week. They have all kinds of sculpting materials, molds and releases, tools and reference books available and even a great online shop. Jolene and I bought some Apoxie Sculpt and some tools and although we were anxious to get home and try our new materials we continued on our shopping excursion.
The next stop was the Japanese Paper Place, or it's retail outlet actually The Paper Place. We spent a little time getting lost because I didn't bring my directions to the shop with me... when we finally arrived I found that they didn't really have what I was looking for (some Mulberry paper to use for costuming little fairies), I did find some lovely papers to try. I've read some interesting uses by fellow dollmakers and was intriqued. It was a lovely place to visit and look around but I think the shop is more geared towards other uses... I'll have to look into it a little more...
First Project
Then we were off home again during rush hour traffic, eager to being our first project!
The Mississauga Muse, or Re-constructing Barbie as I liked to call it. I first had this idea when I found a bunch of abused barbies left in my apartment buildings laundry room. It's a place where people will often leave items to be repurposed, or things that have been gently used can be left to find use by someone else. Things don't hang around there too long, if they are not picked up by the end of the day they are put in the garbage so we often wander down to see if there are any great finds. So... one day there was a bag of barbies ... here you can see what we did with them. Mind you this was an on and off project that we continued working on throughout the week.
First we made our Barbie selection and wired her to a base. Then we thought about what she wanted to become. Mine wanted to be a Dryad, Jolene's was calling out to be a totem pole. What's funny is that she picked her barbie first and it was the most perfect one of the bunch. She had great ball joints and twisty waist and long beautiful hair and ended up bing encased in apoxie sculpt so that none of it showed and she couldn't move at all. We had lots of chuckles over that! Here's some pics of what they looked like at the end of our session. Jolene still had a lot left to do on hers, but she has it all planned out and has done a bunch of research on the subject!
No comments:
Post a Comment