Crafty Tuesday: Constructive Criticism

Or sometimes one can be one’s own worst critic.

Constructive criticism is a funny set of words. One is about building and the other is deconstructing. It is also funny what people think constructive criticism is and isn’t.

For example, hearing “your anatomy is off” isn’t very helpful. But hearing “You need to look at the back leg of your figure. Legs don’t bend like that unless broken” is of much more use.

Honestly I am my own worst critic. I see every flaw and shortcut I did to get to the final product. I see the materials I substituted because I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted. I see every blemish and missed brush stroke.

But what I have learned over time is that there is a point that one just needs to let it go and let others see it.

I use Peter a lot as my sounding board. He has a good eye for things that I didn’t even think about. I trust his opinion about my work because he doesn’t sugar coat things for me.

But occasionally I do get someone who doesn’t like my work and they tell me that they don’t. I ask why and they give me some answer that doesn’t make sense or they give me something else to think about in the final product. I remember one guy didn’t like my work but it turned out that he didn’t like puppets at all and didn’t understand why they were in an art show. I have had to fight the puppets as art battle more than once in my career.

Today I am going to work on a griffin that I have had in my head for a bit. I think I finally have all the pieces sorted out and now can draft it.

I am sure there will be parts that I don’t like but there are always parts that I don’t like or know how I would change them next time. But that is part and parcel of being an artist and a craftsman.

I am grateful for the constructive criticism I have receive over the years including Wendy Froud sending me back to my table to redo my doll’s hand because “You and I know that you can do much better than that”. Thanks Wendy.

Crafty Tuesday: Costuming Then and Now

Except for my professional costuming work, most of what I do is recreations of other people’s designs or I take a 2-D drawing and bring it into three dimensions. This is because most of the conventions we do these sketches at are media conventions. 

Before the Internet, yes children there was a time before the Internet, it was pretty challenging recreating a costume. You had the movie or TV show to go on and for photo reference, if you were lucky, a couple of fuzzy pictures in a magazine like Starlog. If you were really lucky there might be a book on the making of with photos you can use for reference.

Now we have the vast resources of the Internet and there are more magazines with photos. Also more films have making of books, which I would have killed for earlier in my career. But we still had ways of figuring things out and making it look right.

Historical patterns is something else that has changed a lot. Even Halloween patterns didn’t really exist until the late 1980s in standard pattern books. If you wanted to create some shapes, you would have to draft your own, Franken-pattern from existing looks (hard for the fashion of the 80s) or hope that Folkwear had a pattern for it. Now we have all kinds of patterns and patterns that can be used for other things.

I remember a time before fleece when trying to make puppets was the never ending hunt for the right kind of velour or another kind of fabric that was fuzzy and stretched the right way. Antron fleece is still the gold standard for puppets but you can use the fleece for them.

Fabric is always a challenge in costuming. You have to decide if you are going for screen accurate or costume accurate. The lighting used television, stage, and screen changes colors a lot. For example the 8^th Doctor’s coat reads different colors under different light in the TV movie but is, in person, a greenish brown or a brownish green depending on who you talk to. I, for the longest time, thought it was brown. My X-men coat is a prime example of trying to find fabrics to fake the look from the film which was made from UK materials. (Honestly I am still jealous of your stretch fuzzy furs.) I think I did pretty well.

I find costuming a heck of a lot easier now then when I started. New fabrics and new building materials have made things much easier. Patterns are easier to find now that the big pattern makers realized that there is a market for historic costumes and it is a large one. There are still a lot of challenges in recreation which is why I enjoy it but it is nice that I have more of a shot at getting it right now.

I am grateful for everything that has made it easier to recreate costume designs.

Crafty Tuesday: The Year in Convention Terms

So this year I will be attending and showing at

Farpoint (Feb 17-19)

LunaCon (March 16-18^th)

Shoreleave (Aug 3-5^th Note date change)

DragonCon (Aug 31^st to Sept 3^rd)

Or that’s all I know at this point.

In terms of costuming, Caroline is going to do Cheshire at Farpoint. I am sure we will come up with something for Shoreleave. And I have a couple of things I need to do for DragonCon. So that’s the costuming end of things.

Now we will be attending a couple of conventions in addition to those but those are the ones I know I will have art in.

DragonCon has you tell them what you are bringing way ahead of the convention so that they can plan for where the tables are and generate barcodes that work for their system. So DragonCon is sort of the end of my season with things like New York Comic Con in as a bonus for showing stuff.

Most years I start thinking about DragonCon almost right after DragonCon but I tend to plan for DragonCon in June so this year I am going to start planning now and get stuff done in a timely fashion. My goal is to get everything that I say I am going to bring down to DragonCon. This is barring the unforeseen like last year’s hurricane which really put a crimp in my plans.

So right now I am trying to sort out what kind of things I want to bring to the shows. I know there will be new dolls and puppets. I am wondering if I should do a mask or two ala the Cheshire mask I made for Caroline. I don’t want to add to much to the mix but it is always good to add something new. I am feeling another set of hand puppets ala the Boy Wizard set I had a couple of years ago. Firefly is still my thought on that.

I have another idea that is rolling around in my head that I might do or might not. I am still on the fence about it.

Puppets are going to play a big roll this year especially since DragonCon will be having a puppetry track for the first time. So I plan to promote puppets this year. I am thinking maybe a marionette or two.

I am grateful for art shows that are great for my kind of art.

Crafty Tuesday: The 2012 Shiny New Year Edition

Crafty Tuesday is a place for me to either talk about the process of my slightly twisted creative mind, show a step by step on some project I am working on, talk about things in the art world esp. Science Fiction Art Shows, or anything else I deem part of the subject.

I think I am going to be mirroring this in a couple of other blogs that I have to give some content to them all. On Dreamwidth I am Puppetmaker. On Blogspot (Google Blog) I am Puppetmaker40 because Puppetmaker was taken on Live Journal when I joined so there I am Puppetmaker40. All are entitled No Strings Attached as is my web log that runs off of Peter’s web log.

This year I plan to have more process pictures since a lot of people seem to like that. I am even going to go ahead and try to make an Instructable for the papier-mâché masks that I learned from a mask maker back during my college years. Some of the costuming stuff I will show after we use them.

In terms of what I will be making, I think I see more dolls in my future like the Steampunk Animals and the Spring Rabbit I did last year. I also have a couple of puppet ideas I want to execute. One of them is going to take me into some electronics I haven’t done before so that should be exciting.

For learning I am sticking to knitting and crocheting as my new skills for the year but like every year, I expect I am going to pick up a thing or two that I am not expecting because I need them to complete something.

I am opening this up for suggestions of things you would like to see in Crafty Tuesday or what you have liked about Crafty Tuesday.

I am grateful for creative days.