Flumo Halloween Pumpkin Person

  Experimenting with Flumo and one of my old miniature molds. Painted with acrylic.

              Received my "Award of Excellence 2014" from doll magazine. Yippee!
                                         I won in the artist ball jointed doll category.

 

Painting on Flumo is much faster then porcelain of course, and it's nice to be able to finish a face in an hour. Always a learning process, I'm sure I'll get better at it.

  Put Together

I put her together quickly but I did not line the joints with leather or finish painting her arms and legs. I'm making new hands for her since I'm not happy with the ones I have at present time.
 

                Maybe making some flumo dolls would be interesting, it certainly is faster!

    FLUMO

Flumo is an interesting medium. You have to use plaster molds, but it air dries,

which is nice because you need no kiln. It's pretty strong too, and can be polished to a porcelain finish. I use it mostly to make prototypes but have considered using it to make actual dolls because it's so easy to use.
   Here is a prototype I decided to paint. I usually never paint prototypes because I use them to make molds for porcelain. But I love to experiment and am somewhat pleased with the result. I painted the eyes with acrylic and pastels. The pupil and eyeliner are acrylic, but then I used wet pastels with a brush to color the rest of the eye and lips, not to mention a bit of shadow around the nose and nostrils.

    Working on little mermaids

A jewelry store near by wants little polymer mermaids to put in with the jewelry as decoration and also to be for sale. So here I am, after being a little rusty, getting back to making polymer figures. I'm taking a little vacation from porcelain to just get creative with clay and have fun. Sometimes porcelain can be such drudgery because you feel like your doing so many none creative things all the time, like cleaning and sanding.
  Here is what I have so far.

      Working on the Cat

   I was trying new ways of doing the cat's face, I have not painted them yet. I wanted to try primitive for the body, not doing too much detail like I always seem to. Kind of funny! Skinny little legs and arms, ha ha. They seem to be saying "what's the big idea?"

   Messing Around

Messing around with polymer clay making prototypes for porcelain. I can't work on my regular girl until I get some flumo. Made a little cat, burned it a bit, looks like a Siamese now, lol!

                          Maybe I'll use it to make a porcelain little black cat for Halloween.

      Having A Look

  I love having a look at everyone's work, it always gives me ideas for my own. Many times I see work in which I think "I sure wish I had thought of that style or character first!"But I know all I can do is work on my own ever evolving style and characters.
 There are also times in which I have to stay away and shield myself from looking too much, there are so many talented people and I can get discouraged always comparing myself to them. We can only be as good as the amount of work we put in. No one plays the piano very well the first time they sit down to it! And so it takes making plenty of ho-hum dolls to learn to make the really good ones.

   Well here it is 2014 already! Much has happened! I think I will start posting again.

First I'm going to put up a picture of my doll that won the "artist ball jointed doll" category in Doll Magazine's yearly competition.