the bone dragon’s daughter - final pictures
oldoni August 24th, 2008
Lloyd Wilson took some really great pictures of the Bone Dragon’s Daughter for me at NIADA this year…
Saranbileg
oldoni August 23rd, 2008
this is how I displayed Saranbileg (my Saranbileg head on Therese Olsen’s Twiglimbs 2 body) for NIADA and the UFDC Expressions show.
Her clothing is by Magalie Houle-Dawson of MHD Designs and the photograph is by Lloyd Wilson.
unbelievable Japanese BJD artist
oldoni August 21st, 2008
On Denofangels, a link to this artist’s “making bjd” videos was posted…. followed it back to their blog - the artist or his/her works are called Hanano
absolutely humbling and inspiring at the same time.
be sure to see the finished figure
I don’t know what to say. i need to make figures that move me like these do.
I hope you will be as blown away by them as i was…
Kamila Mlynarczyk - woodedwoods.com
oldoni August 7th, 2008
met a great new dollmaker at NIADA, Kamila is Canadian - really sweet person, sells on ebay as Alimaky and has a wonderfully twisted, detailed mind….
her figures are polymer with softbodies and wonderful costumes …. she also gives incredible attention to the details of their environment and presentation.
I really enjoyed talking with her - she created a wonderful printed board book showing her work that I fell in love with….
my personal favorite was her blind girl… 
she also had 2 sleeping (?) brothers - 
her website is woodedwoods.com , can’t wait to see more by her….
home from NIADA - Mrs. Fukuda and Robert McKinley
oldoni August 2nd, 2008
This was an amazing NIADA for me —- I was given a gift of so very much cool encouragement…. I never realize just how very much I crave positive strokes, but this trip really made it obvious to me.
Its so very good to be back home….. Las Vegas in July is just too hot for me! I walked out along the strip one afternoon and it really felt like i was being flash fryed…. it was only 109 degrees, but I found myself pausing in the doorways of the casinos, relaxing in the airconditioning…. Enjoyed the Chihuly flowers at the Bellagio, and saw the Beatles Cirque show at the Mirage….wanted to walk down to see the pyramid but chickened out. maybe next time.
I was given the most incredible kind gift of encouragement from Tomoko Fukuda, a wonderful Japanese Dollmaker, member of NIADA
who came over with her daughter to talk to me about Saranbileg. She said that she knows Mr. Yoshida (who wrote the wonderful book on making Ball jointed dolls - Yoshida Style) and his students who have become professional doll makers, and that she felt that Mr. Yoshida would approve of Saran…..
So Therese! we did good!!! and a number of people were wanting to know more about ball jointed dolls and how they could get a body and head like hers.
i’ve spent a lot of years sculpting what i wanted to sculpt, and as long as I was happy with the sculpt, it didn’t matter so much that other folk didn’t often understand the piece or like it. but i have to admit, it sure feels wonderful just once to have made a sculpt that many people like!
Mrs. Fukuda’s people are real - she had one piece there that caught me completely - an older woman sitting patiently waiting for her cat to wake up and play with her…
I’m going to wallow in the pleasure of having done something “right” for just a little while more, before i go back to my more normal outsider type stuff. funny how seductive a little acceptance is, isn’t it?
But I think that I really want to catch the emotions of a moment in time, like Mrs. Fukuda has done with the old lady and her cat…. maybe that is the lesson i will take away from this NIADA, Saran is beautiful and I love her….. but I really, really wish I had made a piece like the old woman. Ok, so maybe it will be an old lady sitting with her tattoos fading on her wrinkled skin, holding her elderly snake (how do you tell a snake is elderly?)… but I want to catch that sweetly sad emotion.
Mrs. Fukuda’s figures made me think of Robert McKinley’s work. Robert McKinley’s figures were why I wanted to join NIADA in the first place. I bought both of his dollmaking books and tried to follow his way of making figures, when I was first starting out. I’ve heard from a number of people who sent him letters with questions and received wonderful, encouraging replies from him. I never did contact him, being way too shy, but at this NIADA conference, Michael and Jan Langton put up as a helper gift for people to buy tickets for, a little sketch Robert McKinley had done…. and I won it!!!
It makes me smile so very much — thank you Michael and Jan, and thank you so very much Robert — still encouraging us, even now -
update on Saranbileg
oldoni July 6th, 2008
no clothes… I was going to post a warning like i do on bjd forums when i post pics of figures with no clothes, but then….
hmmm, i see a trend here…. i think i’ve done 1 figure with clothes (nope, make that 2 figures with clothes) in the last 3 years or so.
maybe i need to give that to myself as a challenge - do 2 more with clothing. preferably something awesome like sculpted kimonos and steampunk buckles and leathers and gears…..
ahem. ok, stop the mental rambling, back to the post at hand…
Saranbileg is a head for Therese Olsen’s Twiglimbs 2 body…. i posted pics awhile back where she was preparing for casting, and Saran looked like a terracotta soldier…
here she is in resin with a faceup by Meagan…
I do love how alive they can look in the resin… makes a pleasant contrast to the dreamlike white of the premier clay…
the bone dragon’s daughter - update
oldoni July 1st, 2008
madly emulating bone…. i wonder, if the dragon’s spine is roughly 27″ long, and i have until about July 20th, i guess i need to be applying bone at about 1 1/2″ per night. of course - that doesn’t include the ribs, the feet and talons… hmm, don’t think i counted in the neck on the dragon…. and the lady isn’t finished yet. and there isn’t a base yet…
sheesh.
lola in resin!
oldoni July 1st, 2008
ok, this last year I set myself a goal to achieve a bjd in resin. I love bjds - i love the idea of being able to play with them, to move them around and for them to be relatively small but fairly sturdy. In my head, i have strange moving insect people, or slithering sea creatures and more….
But before I can start one of these, i needed to work thru some hangups i had about jointing the limbs (I’ve started lots of bjds over the years - but never gotten much past the heads and torsos). I also had to learn to make silicon molds, learn to cast in resin, learn to clean up the blamed things (its amazing how much sanding goes into preparing a doll for molding — and how many time you have to make new molds. resin is very unforgiving, every single wrinkle, bump and fingerprint shows up in the resin, even if you can’t see them in the polymer or paperclay original)
i was really lucky, my daughter Meg started working with me, and kept me going when my short attention span might have urged me to move on to something else…. unfortunately she turned out to have allergies to the resin and the mold material. Fortunately my son Nate stepped in and started making the molds and helping clean up the casts…. years of WarHammer really paid off (
I decided to start with a very simple bjd, Lola - 8″ tall (9″ with her high heel feet) about 22 separate pieces —- she looks very different in the resin than she did in the polymer original — and she is definitely not a slithery sea creature, but she taught me what I needed to learn, and I think she turned out pretty well. Anyway - she is lots of fun to play with….
this is how she started out :
and this is how she looks in resin :
Saranbileg
oldoni June 25th, 2008
thru the bjd forum Den of Angels, I met an Australian artist - Therese Olsen. A couple of years ago Therese created her own 60 cm resin girl bjd body that she called TwigLimbs. this year she has followed up with a lovely new version of the body, TL2, and an original sd head that she has named Ylisande.
you can see pics of Ylisande on the TL2 body here
and you can talk to Therese about her bjds at her livejournal here.
Therese is an incredible artist - and she has this very cool goal of getting multiple artists to create optional heads for the TL2. and coolest of all, she invited me to try creating heads for her too. so I sent her a headsculpt to try - and she is very kindly cleaning the head up for molding and casting.
I am taking this body and both heads to NIADA to show, and they will also be shown in the UFDC show, Expressions…. We really lucked out, and Magalie Houle Dawson of MHD Designs has agreed to make one of her fabric art outfits for the doll to wear…. I am very excited about the whole collaboration - We named this head Saranbileg (a Mongolian name meaning, approximately, moon gift, and Magalie is creating an asian fusion costume for her.
in the meanwhile, here are pictures of my sd sized bjd head, Saranbileg, on Therese’ TL2 body….
I really loved these pics - they made me think of the terracotta soldiers buried with the Chinese emperor….
boy - this one is going to be a challenge to photograph…
oldoni June 24th, 2008
spent part of May in Washington DC …. and spent time at the National Museum of Natural History. I would have loved to spend even longer in their hall of skeletons…
but while I was there i got this idea for a figure - the Bone Dragon’s Daughter.
The idea being that she is lifting up the skull/mask of the dragon - and its spirit is settling into her as she becomes the bone dragon …
almost put my eye out twice working on the armature for the dragon, so i sure hope this is worth it! to keep it light its body will be skeletal and a combination of paper, flumo and premier….
here are some in progress pics…
