I painted the rest of the cats into skeleton cats.

On a similar note, the Cheshire cat has gone missing.  However, I've heard a curious mewling from under the kitchen sink.  Will investigate tomorrow.

Look at these guys.  Seriously, give them a click, and take a good long look.  Isn't their paint job a little... scary?  I got all five of them in a pack at the dollar store.

All I did is repaint a couple with good ol' fashioned acrylic.  Now the house has the Cheshire cat, and a skeleton cat.

Quick post today.  I made the attic ghost for the dollhouse.  Her name is Lenore.  I didn't make her for Halloween; honestly, I just wanted the house to have an attic ghost.

Here she is, chatting with Poe:

Making her was simple simple simple.  Much easier than pie.  I just took t-shirt material, slathered it with glue, and let it dry over a plastic baggy and a pen that was large and rounded, for shape.  Then I sewed on eyes with eyelashes, and cut out flower shapes, and sewed that on with a gold bead.

Voila!  The house is haunted.

Pay no attention to the scarecrow.  He's just writing hipster poetry and doing the Kanye shrug.

All like: "Whatevs, Kant is overrated."  All like: "Mozart was a two-bit hack. Way too mainstream."  All like: "I don't even scare crows, I just tell them that they're poorly deconstructed bourgeois sheeple."

Today is a day for bats in the belfry.  I know I say this a lot, but you really have to click this to make it bigger, otherwise they're just black blobs.

I made them with wire, black electrical tape, and foil for the body. 

First I made the 'fingers' on the wings with the wire, threading them together.  Then I applied the tape, sticky side to sticky side, so the outside was rubbery and black.  I pressed it down, and it made the 'bones' stand out, like for an actual bat.

They need names now. Any suggestions?  And as always, happy arting!

Halloween approaches, my most favorite of holidays!  So I'm going to make Halloweeny stuff for the house.

I realized this scarecrow was going to be a hipster when I had to spend three hours trying to turn jeans I sewed for it rightside out.  Super skinny jeans of the skinniest sort.

Basically, all you have to do is sew clothes, give it a pipecleaner skeleton, and sew the pants to the shirt, the head to the neckhole.  I used needlepoint canvas for the burlap, because it looks just right for it.

Batman is wary, mumbling about some sort of waterbird.  The Doctor looks guilty and is muttering about things he did when he was John Smith to some sort of sanguine family.

Look at how cute  he is!  He is like a cutie mccuteberg.

Three new books in the house.

In order of appearance: Cinderella (completely illustrated in watercolor, no words except for the title and 'the end'),  River Song's diary (empty, because spoilers), and the pirate code which is pink and sparkly with a purple fake gem eyepatch because I'm a jerk.

Toad doesn't look thrilled at being saddled with the Cinderella book.  It's better than getting Beauty and the Beast; that would be insulting on a number of levels.

Click to make it bigger, if you want!  The illustrations on these two pages are my favorites that I did in the book.

Happy arting!

Okay, you seriously have to click this picture to make it bigger, because there is a lot going on.  This isn't even half of the presents I got yesterday!  (Eeee!)

Starting from right to left, there's a Jack Sparrow who is already blitzed and leaning on the wall with a bottle in hand, right in front of him (and under the time stamp) is a bucket and a roll of paper towels for the ensuing mess.  The Doctor is standing in front of a roll top desk holding a basketball.  Next to him is a cappuccino machine on a table.  Batman is wearing a poncho and futilely trying to vacuum by a stool.

There is a platoon of babies and a little dog in front of a jukebox, with a broom and a golf club leaning against it.

Back to the front, there's a calendar and a letter opener on a desk... thingy, on another table; next to that is a baseball bat and a super cute turtle with an open mouth like it's saying, "Yooo" in a cute turtle voice.

Now to the heavy drinker corner.  Poe and Oscar Wilde, with a bottle of something antiseptic, a case of beer, a can of beer-y stuffs, a chair, a table, and in the far corner, a hatrack.

Whew!

Tomorrow I'll come at you with some more books that I've made.

I am wayyyy too overwhelmed for a proper post today.  I am smiling so huge that my face is all like, "Bro, what are you doing, stretching me like that!  You're such a jerk!"

Today, a dear friend came over and gave me a bunch of furniture and dollhousey stuff.  A lot of it needs repair, but that's part of the adventure.  Seriously, though, an enormous box of it!  Thank you thank you thank you!

And I've been having fantastic luck at garage sales, too.

Tomorrow morning/early afternoon I'll take a picture of one of the rooms all set up with some of my new swag, but right now I'm just gluing legs back onto tables and making the world's hugest grinny face.  This is a million Christmases.

There's been a special delivery of books at the house, for Hagrid and Poe!

Hagrid now has The Monster Book of Monsters from Harry Potter, and Poe has Twilight.  Anyone who thinks that the title says Toilet is sadly mistaken, as I am a mature adult, ahem.
I made the books a pretty standard way, with the folds being in the middle, and stacking tons of papers in there, and gluing them together at the creases, with a scrap of posterboard as the cover.  The Twilight one I just painted.  As for The Monster Book of Monsters... I used felt as the fur, and it worked pretty well because the more I messed with it, the furrier it looked.  I painted the felt to get the right color.  The mouth is made of notecard material, and the eyes are yellow glass beads and I used a pin to paint a black pupil in the center.

Closer look, that I now see is blurry as heck:

I wrote on the insides of the books, too.  Twilight is mostly lyrics to songs and snarky comments.  The Monster Book of Monsters has my actual reimaginings of classic monsters, plus watercolor illustrations.

More books will be forthcoming, once my hands stop smarting so much from writing teeny words!  Happy arting!

So, I did the flooring, and I experimented with my bricks idea.  (I know, I know, I'm an art rock star, people ask for my autograph and swoon at my feet regularly.)

I used some textured paper/paint samples that I got from a home improvement store, peeled off bits of that terrible green wallpaper, and cut bricks. 

A closer view:

Why visible bricks?  Well, the going theory is that Edgar Allan Poe was up to some Cask of Amontillado tomfoolery.  Don't worry, everyone in the house is present and accounted for.

Today was a super art disaster of blarglefish proportions.  I tried to wallpaper another room, but this time instead of the self-stick fabric, I tried cheapo dollar store contact paper stuff that rips at the slightest provocation, and wrinkles, and is just a burp away from being entirely see-through.

The big wrinkly part in the picture is over a window, so it'll be cut out, but I'm trying to decide whether I should embrace the suck and try to dry-brush brown paint over it to age it, and add in bricks in patches on the walls.  Make it look aged. It's either that, or give up on the green stripes.  What do you think?

The movie was awesome!  I had a wonderful team of actors and writers and editors around me, and I'm really super happy with the end product.  I got to make really icky zombie props!  I'll spare you the details.

I came home to find that my mom found me some beautiful dollhouse stuff at garage sales, and I want to show you!

Clicky to make the picture better.  The Doctor has a toy (is anyone surprised?  No?)  A basket of wood, a metal chicken, a cookie jar, glass jars of stuff (the lollipops are made with a bead on a stick, super creative!), a wind-up phone that really rings, a butter churn, a pump... thingy, a can of oats, two baskets of fruit complete with tiny prices, an itty bitty pocket knife, hatchet, wrench, and more.  And tons of othersuch thingamajiggers. 

All for three bucks!  How great is that?  Tomorrow I'm going to try to tackle one of the big rooms, to prep and paper, and maybe floor it.  I'm feeling ambitious.  Happy arting!

OKAY SO!  My room is clean.  This shouldn't be a big deal, but I am just a sneeze below hoarder, and I'm super excited to get everything properly labeled and whatnot. It is immaculate.  Every thingy has a place, and every place is neat and tidy.

Here is a partial picture of my bedroom/workspace:

After this weekend, I should be back to my regularly scheduled artification.  Right now I'm heading to a fifty-four hour horror movie making contest, called Splatterfest!  We're going to write, shoot, and cut a film in the next couple days.  Gonna zombie it up, yo!

By the by, I find myself unable to post comments on my blog, probably a bug or something, but I just want to let everyone know that your comments brighten up my day!

Still cleaning, but I decided to make a wardrobe while I was out of the house yesterday, since I couldn't clean when I was out of the house anyway!  My logic, it is flawless.

I had this super cute sheet of stickers that I found whilst cleaning, and it's kind of... nursery-esque, so I suppose someone in the house is going to have to have a baby.  Or else it's for someone who's young at heart(s).

Here's how it started out:

Here's how it looked after a couple coats of orange tempera paint.

And here's how it looks with the stickers!

I've since ended up moving the orange flower over by the bird. I'll say it's to give it a cute sense of unbalancedness, but really it's because I smudged orange paint on the lake by accident.

Here it is on the inside!  The toys are fuzzy, and they came from cute hairties that were starting to unfringe.  I tugged the scrunchies off, and I'm keeping them as tiny toys.  The ball came from a quarter machine, ages ago.

Guys, guys, guys.  I have regrettable news.  My bedroom (which doubles as a workspace) is so cluttered and cramped that it's even starting to bother me, a difficult feat.

So these next three days or so I'm going on an art fast, because if I do end up working on art I'll do that and I won't clean.  I have zero impulse control, and bad time management skills, so I won't even be picking up a paintbrush, unless it's to put it back where it belongs.  On the plus side, I'll be in livable conditions again.  I'll see you in a few days!

I am super-dee-duper excited right now!  I decided that the house needed a Russian nesting doll.

Taa-daa!

Kind of big for the dollhouse, but not too too big.

I made them by making a mold of two beads with paper and glue, in two parts, attaching them when the molds were dry.  I made a cut a little below the middle.

  I then searched around for other tools I could use, to make a middle-sized doll mold.  I ended up using the bottom of a pen for the bottom, and the bottom of a stitch-ripper for the curve.  The littlest is just made of foil with a paper wrapping.

All the details are done with tissue paper, and the insides are bright orange! The colors are blurry in the pictures, and the details are a little hard to see, but I am unfortunately not a photographer, and I had to manipulate angles with great precision in order to not show the massive mess that is my bedroom.  Have I mentioned how much I love Paper Month?  It's a blast!  The nesting dolls are seriously loads cuter than they look in the picture.