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Treats galore today!
Check out my Typepad Feature!
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(Thanks to Susanna for alerting me to it, and also to Typepad themselves, yay! - especially for the nifty little baby blue Typepad T-shirt that arrived in the mail last week:)
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I have decided that it is time to rest for a little while; to rest, to read, to refuel.....and to treat myself to some thoroughly impractical yet oh-so-necessary doll related goodies :)
We all need to master the art of self appreciation once in a little while.... no matter what our profession, obsessions or responsibilities....for my own part, I have fiiiinally completed a cart load of overdue commissions (whilst settling myself down to contemplate the new ones already ~), plus, having wrenched myself away from Photoshop over the past 24 hours (it hurts, oh lord!), it appears that I have what you might call 'overdone it' for the past two months or so - skipping sleep, neglecting to read, forgetting how to cook (!), etc. So, it is time to take a small, self congratulatory holiday from all things 'work' (apart from the shop and the post office, which never actually stop, because they just can't)...
That said, creating is my favourite, most cherished form of relaxation. This may seem like a wee contradiction of sorts, but you can have too much of a good thing - balance, as always, is the key. It is vital, once in a while, to distance yourself, if only slightly, from the very thing that you love the most, if only to appreciate it all the more. I have this peculiar habit of becoming literally consumed by the urge to create, vanishing into (or out of) myself for weeks on end, and then hurtling back to earth again of a sudden, as if waking from a curious dream, only to find that somewhere along the line I have forgotten to pay the household bills, developed a very stiff neck, and generally making rather baffled enquiries as to what day it is.
Sometimes, the simple task of answering emails can swallow up an entire afternoon here at Art&Ghosts Towers. Absolutely none of the Circus recruits ever lends a hand (the circus-y temperament is most certainly a volatile thing ~ on many an occasion, having asked a stray member for assistance when parceling up my shop orders, I have experienced a fierce dig in the ribs for my troubles, swiftly followed by a sneaky little stamp on the foot...almost always accompanied by a chorus of giggles or "Hoh!" sounds as I am left to get on with it, alone, as usual).
So, all that accounted for (not to mention the practical side of life!), I think that I really do deserve a little rest. It will likely last all of 48 hours, as opposed to my pre-planned week, but nevermind. I can try! A few abandoned hours with a box set of my favourite detective drama's...or else curling up on the sofa with a compilation of gothic short stories (yes, I'm still hooked on the old ghost tales) or simply singing to my cat ( he likes this) ought to do the trick. Not forgetting the thrill of anticipation that always precedes the arrival of new doll related goodies in the post - oh yay!
And then there's this.........
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My other Somerset feature.....many features in one month, or so it seems. A strange thing to behold here in my little private world! It finally arrived this week, so colourful, packed to the seams with so much digital collage-y loveliness....such a pleasant surprise indeed!
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A peek at the inside...
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And so on, you get the picture.
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Speaking of magazines, I was quite pleasantly shocked to behold this particular little number sitting on an all but neglected crafty-type-shelf at the local book store this afternoon...
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And the Etsy feature in the back too! It was rather costly to purchase, but shops here in the UK charge almost the US dollar equivalent (import costs added, etc), so...what can you do? A $30 book ought to cost me somewhere around £15 here, but we will generally pay up to £25.
To be English and earn your living in Dollars is a very surreal thing indeed (lets not even contemplate the ever painfull splitting-in-half of my gross earnings each week). That said, I have become so used to it now that I struggle to negotiate my own currency - writing out British addresses feels almost foreign to me, they no longer flow with the same ease as my abbreviated States and Zip codes;).
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So, now for the treats and doll goodies!
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A gift that i adore. I just love the blue stripes with the floral pattern, and the buttoned up collar! Such a pretty thing; the skirt poofs out like a 1950's ballgown (knee length), with a beautiful lace trim underskirt to boot!
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My Lati purchases (after much saving and waiting!)
Top left to bottom right:
1.Sweet Berry dress set.
2.White Ribbon MSD sized shoes.
3.White MaryJanes for my Lati (green) Lea!
4.Lati Yern Doll (complete with immaculate Classic Loli Dress) mwhaaaaa! (she is also the girl in the Sweet Berry dress picture). How perfectly haunted she appears. Haunted, yet self contained content! She will be sure to appear in many of my images to come.
*love*
Madness, said a wise old soul, comes in many guises. I could not resist this strange, large headed little creature, either.....
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Yep, it's the Frara Dal.
She shall be sketched and painted relentlessly, no doubt!
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And lastly, I finally located a curious (and rather elusive) little girl that has been haunting my imagination for quite some time now. A very lovely lady on Flickr decided to put her up for 'adoption', and the rest, of course, is history...
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Photo taken from the Doll&Doll website.
So there completes my self appreciation for one month! Needless to say, buying in USD's is considerably more pleasant than selling in USD's. Everything basically comes to half price;)
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....Complete, that is, apart from the books! Some of my dream books are on their way at long, long last!
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Katan Doll - with dolls by Amano Katan, photographs by Yoshida Ryo.
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Quivering Eyelid Photobook, both available at one of my favourite online shops: Dollmore!
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Now, before I leave you for the afternoon, I should like to pay a teenyweeny homage to Photoshop, and to those of you who have ventured to ask me 'how' I fashion my digitally illustrated images (those which begin with a photograph). Well, my Etsy profile does contain far more of a satisfactory explanation than the following illustration, but I have never bared my naked PSD files to the world before, and it might just be about time they made an appearance; all raw and higgledypiggledy!
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The first image might go so far as to ever so slightly illustrate how I transfer colours from one image to another, taking samples from my old paintings and textures (like watercolour washes, acrylic smears, etc), and creating brand new brushes in the process. Nearly every painting that I have ever made has somehow found a part of itself featuring (however slightly) in future works. In this instance, a tiny blob of crimson was used to make the blush on my girls cheek. Why did I not do this with a ready made brush? I can't say, I just enjoy doing things this way.
The central image Shows one of my 'Parts' files. I store countless parts and selections (like collage cut-outs) in small PSD files, so that by now, you can imagine that I have what might amount to a City library sized amount of the things lying around on separate hard drives and data discs! Who said that digital collage was less messy than traditional scissors and glue???? The blue dress to the right of the image is the pretty new frock that I shared with you earlier in this post. I obliterated the pattern and moved some of the limbs around quite a bit, also disposing of the head! This is how i 'paint' into the photographs, sometimes to the extent that they are, more or less, a 'complete' illustration by the time that I am done. I swapped the colour and texture of the frock for semi-transparent acrylic clouds, created new arms from the texture of an old cardigan, and finally, drew in the legs (my own had been bare, but I preferred that she wore black stockings). The remaining 'parts' within this document include a Breyer model horse, a painted stack of books, a sketch of an owl, various drawings of the 'Somnambulist's' mask, and one of my most regularly used doll heads, now sporting thick bangs (in other words, a fringe).
Some of these little motifs are evident in my most recent creations, for better or for worse!
The last image shows a single file containing work that I created for a recent commission, in which I created a doll-like figure for an artist's website/logo design. She had desired something akin to the figure in Lake House, originally, although we wound up with something altogether different in the end!
And that's about it, for now.....although now that I have begun, I might not be able to stop sharing such weird little examples of my 'work in process' with you from time to time. Stranger things have happened.
As for right now, I simply must go and attend to a stray unicorn that has somehow managed to kick its way into the Art&Ghosts Circus rehearsal tent. He is very handsome, and very distracting with it, but I am used to this by now...
Back soon!
lou xxx
