Hands you surprises...

Oh man, this week has been nuts!

So much has been going on in fact, that I'm gonna have to write a couple blog posts!

Unless of course ya'll like reading small novels....

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You know what I like about art?


About a week and a half ago, a customer purchased one of my Barn Owls from my Etsy Shop.

Since the only one I had left was the rusted up one on the back porch, I whipped her up a brand new one.

Now, the Barn Owl was a design I created last year (summer of 2011) while I was experimenting with horseshoes and wind chimes.

This was a really rough time for me. My business wasn't doing very well. I didn't have any work. My finances were hurting a lot. And I was always receiving 'suggestions' about what my art SHOULD be (which apparently was copies of the cheap, mass produced Walmart crap, because that's what people supposedly liked).

This all amounted to making me incredibly depressed and struggling to find ways of making fast, easy designs that didn't look like cheap crap. Which for some people, is very easy... but for me? Not so much... I don't do 'simple and cute' very well.

I also stumbled upon the discovery that making functional wind chimes that actually DID what they were suppose to do was not as easy as I thought it would be... apparently there's actually some SCIENCE that goes into those things, other then just hanging some bells off chains.

In the end... the best I could come up with was a spinner type thing. A spinner I tried to make as simple as possible, because I wanted these to be nice, affordable decorations that wouldn't consume a lot of time.

Well... unfortunately... though the design is fairly cute, it was still time consuming, and ultimately a little lacking. Which resulted in it not being much of a big seller. Which to me, felt like I'd wasted a huge amount of time and materials on a dud.

I didn't bother touching the design again.

Fast forward to a week and a half ago. Oh snap! Someone actually BOUGHT one of these little guys! Looks like I'll have to make one up!

Except... the design hadn't gotten any prettier in the year it'd been sitting around collecting dust. And if I was going to make up a new one... then gosh darn it! I was gonna do it right!

One of the things I am always doing is revising, adjusting, stream lining, and sometimes scrapping, old designs and ideas. Rarely is the first incarnation of a sculpture the best it will ever be. There is always room for improvement, and I like to improve.

That boring, kinda cute, kinda bleh Barn Owl design needed an overhaul. And I'd just been handed the perfect opportunity to do so.

I wanted to stick with the original design concept, but the tiny, pointy wings had to go! So did that ugly, wilty tail! And in their place... something much fluffier, broader, and cuter. Barn Owls are going to look stumpy and fat because of the horseshoe, so emphasizing that was going to look better.

I also replaced the flat, dead washer eyes with some big, bright, blue ones! My washer-and-marble technique has improved drastically since those early days, and I had a bunch of round marbles that needed a purpose.

The beak also broadened a bit, making it a little less angular.

All of this resulted in 'filling out' the owls shape, so it looked more natural, rather then super fat with a tiny face and tiny wings.

I tried out a new kind of chain... much smaller and lighter weight then the original chain, and a lot cleaner looking. The owl also received a new paint job. My previous owls paint was due to the fact that I'd cut the tail out of an old business sign. That wasn't going to work forever, and I wanted a cleaner, prettier alternative.

This same afternoon, I decided to try out another owl design. I was really liking where the new and improved Barn Owl was going, but I wanted to go a different route with the horseshoe, while still using the same design patterns.

That's another thing I like to do... patterns are almost NEVER solely exclusive to the sculpture I originally designed them for. Almost anything can have alternate applications.

You know what I really like about art?

Even though you are the creator, the designer, the architect, the painter, the writer, the 'wizard behind the magic'... even though you are there for every step of the creation process... the finished product can still surprise you.

Art has a mind of its own. Whether it's writing, dancing, singing, painting, digitalizing, sculpting, photographing... whatever it may be... when you sit down and start making something, there's no guarantee that it'll turn out how you had planned. Sometimes a design picks itself up and takes off in a direction you weren't expecting, and by the time you sit back and look at your finished piece, you think "Damn! You are one sexy devil."

That's kind of how I felt with this owl. I had a fair idea of what I was going for. Something a bit bigger then the Barn Owl, utilizing the same patterns. The only new thing really was making an actual head.

But when I finished putting this together... buffed him up, brushed some paint across its wings... all I could think was "OMG!! You turned out SO MORE AWESOME and cute and fluffy and 'hangs-perfectly-on-the-wall' then I had anticipated!"

That is what I love about art. Even though I create every piece with my own hand, it will still surprise me. It will do things I wasn't planning on. It'll change shapes and sizes and themes. Sudden flashes of inspiration will send me romping down a creative path I hadn't anticipated, dragging my poor sculpture behind me and winging it into a form it hadn't originally been intended for. And sometimes... yes, a fair bit of those sometimes... it'll turn out way uglier then I thought it would. But that is the beauty of art. It lives, it moves, it does the unexpected. Even its creators don't always know how it turns out.

And I for one like it that way!