heysoupface

I made some more tiny toys. And these ones are kind of special... They're the first tiny toys I've made since moving into my new house. Plus! I actually made all of them using wood I found in and around this place which I now call home. That's kind of cool, right? The funny thing is that one of the few pieces of wood that didn't come from my new home is the tiny house on the Happy Rock mini-diorama. (Oops!) But everything else was made of little bits and pieces that I found while scrabbling around after I moved in. (Okay, everything else except three of the hats on the Pebble People...are you happy now??) Have a look-see at all of the very good things that I made! •Happy Rock  / Cool Rocks mini-diorama • •Spooky Rock  / Cool Rocks mini-diorama • • Helpful Rock / Cool Rocks mini-diorama • •Deadly Rock  / Cool Rocks mini-diorama • • Messy Rock / Cool Rocks mini-diorama • • Capsule Castaways [cloud+rain+hill] special edition • • Messy Mountain • • Pebble People •

Yes, I realize that my posts have become incredibly sporadic and that I can't keep blaming my inactivity on moving into a new house. But the sad truth is that I'm a very finicky artist who needs everything to be in its proper place before he can get his head right and good for creating. However, I have finally made enough progress in my new office to show it off. Up top you'll see the very good "shrine" to some of my favorite toys that I've made and couldn't bear to sell. Why not join me on a virtual tour of the rest of the space while you're here?

Okay. Still haven't fully recovered from the stress of buying a house and then moving into that house. And, sadly, my garage art studio remains in shambles so I have not made any new toys since the move. But! I remembered that I had forgotten to post these three small series of toys that I made just before my move. Can you guess which is which in these photographs from just the title of this post? I bet you guessed them all correctly, didn't you? Yeah, that was too easy. I'll make it harder next time. Also, I think there might be one or two of these toys left in my online store in case you're interested in purloining one of these puppies. ;-y

This short video is one of the last things I made in 2020. For the music, I used a song entitled "Further Discovery" by an artist named Blear Moon; the song itself is actually what sparked the idea of a little traveller travelling someplace. I made the video is a hurry, but it turned out well enough that I don't feel too embarrased to share it on the world wide web! Let me know what you think after you've watched it, okay? The Nomad from Douglas Gauthier on Vimeo .

While I'm posting pictures of the making of things, it's only fair that I post some Capsule Castaways work-in-progress pics. These are all from the first series of Capsule Castaways which I made in the summer of 2019. For this toy series, I tried to do as little shaping of the wood pieces as possible and instead attempted to "figure out" what the tiny bits already were (people, cars, houses, etc). It felt almost like doodling with wood, if that makes sense? I was only able to make these the way that I did, because I had kept all of the little cast-off bits leftover from previous wood toys. A couple of the finished pieces were too good to let go, so my wife and I each decided to kept our favorites. I kept this orange one below and she kept the purple bookworm underneath it. But the rest were up for grabs and there wasn't really a stinker in the bunch (but I might not be entirely objective in this matter). Looking back through these pictures, I'm getting a creat...

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...