It’s time for the @pureartcollab project recap! My most recent blog posts were tutorials stemming from my @pureartcollab pieces, so you may have already seen that our overall theme for this round was Winter Wonderland. We decided to do a nonfandom theme since we had just done 2 in a row, and we know not everyone enjoys making fandom-based art!
Our followers helped us pick the themes by telling us what they thought of when they heard “winter wonderland.” From there, @amotherofdragoneggs and I boiled the submissions down to the 4 weekly themes. Amazingly, almost everyone’s submissions fit within these groups.
Thank you to everyone who participated and submitted their creations! We would not be doing this without you.
There were a couple of themes from this round that tripped me up a little. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to create for landscape, and I think winter holiday ended up being a little too broad for me, so I had a hard time focusing enough to figure out what I wanted to do. In the end, I’m pretty happy with how everything turned out, but I thought I was going to go crazy cleaning up all of that white clay!
I did remakes for some of these themes because I wanted to try different techniques or make changes to improve the previous rendition I had created.
Theme 1: Ice
Theme 2: Snowman
My snowman creation was also a remake. The original one was made for a Christmas art trade in 2016. I stuck to the basic design from last time—I wanted him to be in an upright pose like a classic snowman is—with coal accents and a carrot nose. I used a special blend of white clay this time around and added a little knit scarf too.
I’ve been toying with the idea of adding mouths to my dragons as it’s usually been left out on purpose for my art style (usually I only add mouths on the rare occasion I’m creating an open mouth with teeth). I just have something with mouths haha! Even when I’ve sculpted human characters before, I’ve usually left off the mouths for a more minimalistic feel. I decided to give this little guy a happy mouth to add to his happy eyes. We’ll see if this is something that sticks around, but I think it worked out okay here.
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- 2016
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- 2018
Theme 3: Landscape
As I mentioned before, landscape was the theme that I struggled with the most. How was I going to incorporate this into my dragons? It seems much more obvious now that I’m looking back on the project. I decided to create a 2-part project.
For landscape, I created a fun little wintry base, complete with snow, ice, and a frozen pond, and I sculpted it to be a companion piece to my snowdragon. The figure is removable from the base, so they each stand on their own, but they are meant to be a set!
I used the same snowy polymer clay blend as the dragon, but I added texture to the base. The crystals are the same from my ice dragon. They ended up turning yellowy this time when I baked them again (pretty sure my oven temperature was too high), so I added a thin layer of white paint to tone it down. This way they still looked translucent, and they still stand out from the base in terms of color.
The pond is pigmented resin, and the remainder of the base is painted white to coordinate. I textured some green clay to look like baby pine trees, and I wanted them to be covered in snow, so I used some white puffy paint to add some texture at their tops.
And then here is what the set looks like:
Theme 4: Winter holiday
It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to make for this theme, and I decided to do something COMPLETELY different. I thought about all of the things I love about this time of year, and one of the things that stood out to me was making and decorating cut out cookies with my family (mainly my mom).
For this week, I decided to create a little cookie ornament inspired by this activity. I cut out a dragon silhouette from dough-colored clay, softened the edges, and added texture and shading all around the “cookie.” I then mixed up “frosting” using TLS and chalk pastels/powder pigments and frosted the base.
And there you have it! A look into my thought process and struggles for this round of the @pureartcollab. I did some different things with this set of themes, and I think it worked out pretty well! It makes me want to think a bit differently about the future themes, although I think this particular theme lent itself very well to the kinds of pieces I created. I guess we’ll see :). Next theme will be announced on January 6! We’re diving into one of my favorite fandoms.
As we’re heading toward the end of the year, I’m starting to plan next year’s blog posts. What are some things you’d like me to cover?