heysoupface

Lump Body! These clay figurines were heavily influenced by my love of The Gumby Show - especially the first season (from 1956) which is my favorite. I used to make stop motion videos and these little dudes could've been perfect plasticine puppets...if only I hadn't baked them to be hard as rocks. When I sold these at fests, people would always *poke* them to find out if they were squishy (nope - rock hard, sorry?). See here! I had the foresight to take some pictures of the process. How nifty. Once they were painted and varnished, I bagged them up with mini handdrawn header cards. I would've preferred to print the cards, but my doggone printer crapped out on me just as I was starting this project... Now that I think about it, my printer breaking down was just one of many less-than-ideal events that sandwiched the making of these lumpy bodies. From months of moldy apartment walls to a temporary sojourn in an Air BnB where I caught a nasty case of vertigo (long story) and then...

It's been nearly a decade since I regularly posted here, so I thought to myself, "Why not catch up on a few more things that have happened in between?" Like the very first series of wood toys I made a few years back (2018 to be precise). Those little buddies at the top of the post were called Friendly Friends. There were six variants in total (go and count them, I'll wait), and all of them had cute shape-y heads that swiveled on their little bodies. Friendly Friends came bagged with a tiny comic zine imbedded into the header card. There were instructions on the back of the header to "cut along the dotted line" which would reveal the zine underneath. Can you imagine? I had completely forgotten about doing that sneaky zine header card until looking back at these pics. Neat. These two purple babies below were my favorite of the bunch (because purple is my favorite color, you see). And the little triangle-y headed one was far and away the best out of all of them...

This blog used to be all about "plush this" and "plush that." Well, not anymore, chum! These days I'm strictly a tiny toy man, and I can assure you that I come by my love of the small stuff honestly. In fact, my earliest childhood memories are of visiting the neighborhood toy store to pick out Starcom and Air Raiders mini-figures. Even now, as a fully-grown adult person, I frequently dream about finding tiny toys. Those are my favorite dreams until I wake up to the disappointment of NOTHING. :'-r Uhh, segue... Did you know that my wood toys are heavily influenced by the old wooden Erzgebirge-style Christmas ornaments I grew up with? (That would be pretty spooky if you did already know that.) The very first wood toy I made was supposed to become a Christmas ornament itself, but I liked the darn thing so much as a standalone figurine that I kept it that way. See! It's got a cute little gold hat and everything.   Back in the pre-2020 year of 2019, I started...

Being "trapped" inside my apartment for nearly a year has got me pining for things I never cared to revisit before now. Case in point - this blog! I thought I had moved from this place for good, but using tumblr  was never my cup of tea and  instagram  feels increasingly like a pale shadow of its former self. So, umm, maybe I'll start blogging again...at least until the outside world returns, you know? We'll see what happens! ;-y