MyBlog

Feeling confused? I am. But goodness knows no one is as confused as Larry. He looks at a descision in his life, and his mind boggles!! Gah!! "Do I buy the sushi or the strudle??" What to dooo... what to doooooo??

This guy is fairly random. You see, there's this deep, dark place in my mind where oddities and carnival folk roam... and I only access that area during moments of complete inner reflection... or a boring meeting.

Speed sketch by Amanda Day with Photoshop CS

She's a little bit of sunshine,
She's a smile to light your days,
She will steal your heart and
keep it with her warm endearing ways,
She's your precious little fairy,
With a sweetness from above
Who will fill your years with laughter
and your lives with lots of love

My miniature baby fairy. Her name is Faith and she was named by her lovely new owner! I love making these little sculptures. I've made at least a dozen of these through my sculpting career. They're really fun to make while other sculptures are tormenting me from the oven as they take an hour to bake. You would think that putting a fairy in the oven they would want to get outta there as quickly as possible. Nooooo, the little sods make themselves comfortable. I can picture it now, sitting against the glass of the oven, little towel wrapped around them, treating it like a flippen sauna.
Anyway.. I can't possibly do nothing while waiting for my sculptures to finish curing so these little creations are born. I'm really considering doing a video for them, but I keep changing my technique, so I'll have to be consistent in that area before teaching others how to make them.

The sculpting dream tends to tug and pull at you. Sometimes you sculpt something you're happy with and sometimes you wish you could do better. I know there's a lot of beginners out there who get frustrated when they sculpt something and it doesn't appear how they imagined it. All I can say is I know how you feel.


I still view myself as somewhat of a beginner compared to other sculptors who make art seem effortless. I see artists who started sculpting around the same time as me are soaring ahead of me. The likes of Renata Jansen who used to get me to critique her work is now among the masters. But what is success in the art world? Is it how fast you grow compared to others? Is it how much money you make? I personally think it's neither. I think when you can get to the point where one day you can look at something you've created and feel proud, that's success. Only you know how much work went into a piece and how far you've come from your first work. Why let others define how good of an artist you are?


There is a reason behind this ramble of mine. Yesterday I was walking through the tourist walk on one of the mountains here in Australia with my darling boyfriend. He laughed when I kept leading him into all the handmade gift stores. He said to me "It's funny, you walking into a store like this must be like when I walk into an electronics store". I suppose it is! LOL. Not that I really go in there with the purpose of buying something, but I still find it interesting looking at what other people are making. We also decided to wander into a Fine Art Gallery. They had many sculptures there and it was amazing to see what people have made and what prices they were putting on it.


Recently I have been seriously considering breaking into the fine art market. I want to make a sculpture and get it cast in bronze. The lady of the gallery was very friendly so I decided to ask her a few questions. I asked her what was involved in getting into a fine art gallery with bronze work. She asked if I was the proposed artist, and when I confirmed she instantly transformed into a snob. She looked down the bridge of her nose at me and stated that I would need to prove that I wasn't a mediocre artist. That I had to bring her at least 6 bronze sculptures of a very high standard or I will be discarded. Talk about ouch. I know what she said was probably true but man, she wreaked of snobbery. It felt like nonsense to me as I knew I could do better than most of the bronze works in there. There was a bronze lady, sitting on stone, her head was too big, her feet were WAY too small... she was riddled in anatomical errors. This piece was selling for $3500! I thought to myself that I could do better than that if I tried and her snobbery was misguided. All she saw was a little girl dressed in pink who probably only made stuff her parents were proud of. I felt like running home and grabbing a portfolio and showing her how much I've been making from my dolls already. Oh yes I was getting myself worked up.


Then I suddenly stopped feeling so selfish and thought.... I wonder how many other starting artists were slammed down by one snobbish art keeper? I wonder how many lost faith and kept doing little crafts for next to no money because they felt they couldn't be up there with the masters. Don't lose faith. Use instances like that to prove them wrong. Who knows, maybe one day you'll be on TV or on advertising posters and that snobby art keeper will look and say... daaaammmnnn. That's what I'm going to do. I don't care if people think I'm good enough. I'm going to save up some money, get a bronze sculpture collection and take them to an art show. I'm not going to be sitting there wondering if I measure up. I'm just going to aim for something I can look at and feel proud of. If I earn a lot of money that's always a bonus lol. Yep, that's what I'm going to do.