Katiedoodlelou

lets goooooo!

so, a follow up on my last post to keep motivation up.

cosplay progress: Had to make a little compromise for my Blackbeard cosplay plans as the weather has certainly not been pleather clad, fake bearded, fake tattoo friendly. I have all the pieces completed but unfortunately i fear sweating may result in the ink on the tattoo sleeve bleeding, and this would make me very sad indeed. Instead, i decided to do the other half of the cosplay, i turned myself into (kinda) Stede Bonnet! Woohoo!

hopefully ill get a day where i can tackle the Ed lewk soon enough.

I do feel i need more practice with masculine makeup, i think i need to go full on drag for a look in the future, harsh lines and high contrast, but i think i did pretty well nonetheless.

painting progress:

I haven’t prepped a canvas in a hot minute, i forgot how therapeutic slapping a load of white on a new canvas was.

with the canvas prepped i started to think about how i wanted the painting to feel, i knew perfection was not my goal, far from it. Since the painting is based on my poorly written poetry full of teen level angst, i knew i wanted the rest of the piece to reflect that style; it’s me lashing out, things haven’t been going my way and thus i have resorted to a creative temper tantrum.

My email has recently changed, mildly irritating as i just so happed top have printed a whole bunch of CVs out (another branch of my life that is a constant source of disappointment is my work life) so of course these are now useless.

So, beef with my useless CVs, a whole bunch of rather outdated business cards that i never got to pawn off and sheets and sheets of stickers made for an online shop that was dead on arrival… perf.

So that’s my backdrop. I think its rather fitting really, i quite like the idea of having those career based bits that I’ve, as a whole, found incredibly wanting, then layering poetry and art over the top, like, “look! This is me!”.

Thats it so far for the painting, the next steps will probably be a rough ‘sketch’ layer to plan out the composition. I don’t think its going to be a fully finished painting, i want some parts to be more detailed than others, i want it to be layered too, like I’ve gotten distracted mid way and started something else… as you can probably tell, that sums me up quite nicely.

The bear:

last but not least i have made some progress on the latest bear project!

Foam clay is an odd material. I’ve never used it before but thought it might be a good option for my bears since its so light weight and maintains a slight flexibility after drying. I used it this time to sculpt the face plates and other little pieces for the bears bodies and i have some thoughts.

Firstly, I LOVED using the clay, i was so easy to work with with how it sticks immediately to itself, it honestly cut my sculpting time in half, maybe more.

it is indeed, incredibly light and flexible, i dont think there’s much risk of chipping or cracking and I haven’t noticed all that much shrinkage.

There is a downside though, it dries slowly and if you have a curve, it wants to flatten out, i sculpted the faces to lay curved against the bears heads, they top side dried great whilst still laying on top of the bear, but when i had to flip it to dry the underside they definitely got a little misshapen, so if im to use foam clay again, the faces will need to be flatter.

Next steps are the fun part, painting, assembling and accessorising!