Horses!

I received a request for a couple of custom horses.  What beautiful horses too!  I've been working from some pictures to get the colors and markings right, I like how they're turning out so far.  Take a look, Smokey doesn't have any hair yet though...

Bowties!

I forgot to take a picture of my handsome wolf groom with his bow tie on!  I think he looks snazzy.

Wedding Toppers

Oh I'm so glad I had this time today!  I love the way these guys turned out!  I have my wolf groom and my penguin bride!  They haven't been cooked yet because I want to get the "okay" first, but I really like how these 2 turned out. 

Now I have a new custom order to make... time to sculpt some horses...

The Penguin Bride!

I've been working on a new wedding cake topper for Nancy!  I've been working on the bride and so far I have this little lady.  I made a variety of different blue flowers for the lace veil and I left an arm off that I'm going to put on once I make the groom so I can have them touching.  I'll probably have her head a little different.. maybe turned to look at him. She's about 3 inches tall and I plan on making the groom a little taller since he's a wolf.  I like how it's coming so far... I hope she does too!

Workshop: Wedding Toppers!

I'm working on making more options for my shop.  Wedding toppers are a great way to expand.  People want very specific things sometimes, so custom cake toppers are a great thing for me to make.  I started with a pair of pandas.  These are not too complex but they have a slight realism to their form so they're not my really cartoony ones either.  Think of it this way.  Say I have 3 levels of toppers, this would be in the middle range.  I'm working on flowers, veils and top hats.  I think I'm going to add a little bow tie as well to the groom.

 

I think I want to do some embracing animals too... Maybe kissing, hugging, dancing... playing chess?

Dragons and Things

So I decided to start making some new stuff for my Etsy shop.  I'm trying to figure out what the best animals to focus on are but really it's going to be a trial and error thing.  I'm starting out focusing on dragons, foxes, owls, frogs, elephants and a few others... Those seem to be the big hits.  At the moment I'm knocking out some dragons, mainly cuz they're fun.  Here's a few for you...

Check out my etsy shop too... I'll have more stuff up soon!

http://www.etsy.com/shop/ClayCrittersByLiza?ref=si_shop

Clay Critters

It's been about 10 years since I got clay critters up and running but here it is, back in action and better than ever.  I've finally got that handle on on how to take proper pictures (scrapbook paper really helped) and finally figured out exactly how this kind of business is run.  Well maybe not exactly but I think it's a step in the right direction!

Time Lapse Apt.

Frat House

The Frat boy's house is really coming together. There are a lot of odds and ends that need to come together but so far, so good....

Molds

...and it's time to start seeing some progress! Now that I have molds of most of the important, redundant objects, I can start mass producing objects for the apartment! The objects are all made out of plastic and the molds of silicone.

Making Molds!

Here I am prepping and pouring molds of some of the hardware and appliances in the houses. I'm then going to make casts out of plastic.

Progress...

Here are some new pictures of the progress of the apartments... Sorry it's taken so long to get up, there are obviously some crucial pieces missing, but there is a lot more to show now.

Truck!

Also, here are some finished photographs of the truck - compliments to Mike again.

An Update from Mexico!

My cousin Mike Laura and I finally got our schedules lined up to shoot Mexico. He's got some really cool footage and some even cooler stills. He brought over a couple strobes and proved just how much they can change a picture. Here's some of the pictures he shot:

Video Update

This is what I've been up to - hanging out in the cave.

Let There be Light!!

So we were curious as to how the lights would look in the rooms, since a few of them will be on. I need to iron out exactly the rest of the back story so that I can really figure out how I want the lights and whatnot, but I do think I'm going to stray away from the blood and guts in fear of looking too much like CSI's miniature killer.
The light we used was a small LED flashlight that we quickly learned was nowhere near the type of lighting we actually need. The lights are outstandingly bright and have way too strong of a cone shaped light. Everything is just so harsh. We talked to the good people over at Bull Street Station, the miniature train store, and they explained to us we were looking at getting LED bulbs that are the size of a grain of wheat or rice. Those are crazy small little bulbs. I'm going to have Stephen explain the general idea of the electricity and the construction of the building in his post. That all being said, I took pictures of some of the lighting and it's really dynamic and I thought I would share. Again... ignore pikachu.

The last picture here is just no lights, just a general idea of the layout thus far and how light hits it without limitations.

Calculations: Round 2

I'm glad we decided to make the apartments bigger instead of making my scale smaller, because most dollhouse scales work off 3/4in = 1ft, so if I were to use any prefabricated items as a base, they would not be the right scale, nor would any of the minis that I had already finished. So after all that cutting and tongue and grooving... it was all done over so everything looked pleasing and not so cluttered.
The one problem we did run across was the long hallway and dining area. Originally there were double door size entryways leading to the living room and the hallway. Unfortunately the way it was set up, there was no logical traffic pattern once I added the furniture. We knocked down the dining room walls and shortened the entry "hallway" to make a great deal more room for furniture. It's a very open floor plan, which works wonderfully with all of the set ups, it's just hard for me to recompile my ideas based off the completely different floor layout style. It had become much like a studio apartment.
The pictures below are the walls and rough flooring of the apartments. There are going to be cabinets over the gaps in the kitchen area (the notepad is a space holder), metal door jams (or something like it), trim, window treatments and doors. There's also going to be a whole lot of things in the apartments, and I'm really excited to film my process of putting each of them together.

The quarter is to show you the general size of the bed and apartments. If you haven't noticed already, this stuff is really really tiny. The couch now has pillows and no pikachu (don't ask, I needed something amusing for scale). The fridge also isn't finished, so Don't worry I know this isn't exactly motivating as far as my actual talent goes. Baby steps, my friends. Keep in mind that this is only 1 apartment of the 6. All the apartments are going to fit into the outer shell of the building but I'll have a demonstration of Stephen assembling it, when the time comes.

Okay now I didn't tell you I had finished the beds did I? Well based on what you know about the tenants, see if you can guess whose bed is whose. They're cluttered, yes, BUT that's part of the challenge.

Also, for those of you wondering what any reference to "the cave" may be... it's my little workshop, where the wonderful world of little tiny things are made. Glance into my world.

Calculations: Round 1

Sorry, sorry for not having updated sooner but I'm about to post a few in a row to catch up... minor camera/computer difficulties, no worries.
Thank you to the lovely Jennifer Mark, I got some wonderful floor plans, apartment layouts and some very confusing but ultimately very correct measurements. Anyway, Stephen Bodiford and I went to work making things to the scale everyone had decided on, which was 3/4in = 1ft. I went to work crafting all the photos, labels, etc. as you have seen in the previous posts as well as starting in making all 6 beds. I calculated all of the measurements of everything using my scale ruler so I knew everything had to be right (in theory). Well Stephen went ahead and cut all of the wood for the apartments based on Jen's drawings and had it all ready to put together when we realized how large the bed I had made actually looked in the apartment. I had told Jen to make each apartment as close to a foot wide as possible, so that I could keep it a reasonable size. Turns out, when you ask the designer to do things against norm, you sacrifice things... like space. The apartment she drew came up to be a little over 300 square feet. That's tiny, itty bitty tiny. Since at this point time is of the essence, Stephen drew up the new plans which worked well for him since hes building the "dollhouse" itself. The new plans are twice as large which yields an enormous project, but still not quite as big as Mexico (still haven't forgotten about it, I ran into difficulties filming). I'll let you see what we had first and then you can see what we're working with now.




That's about how far I got with the beds, I had pretty much completed this one when we realized the size problem.

That's the floor plan that Jen had made. You can see the bed parts in the background (Queen Size), so you understand the footage problem we were having. All the lines under that carpet that's going down, are walls. It was very small, compact even.

The video above is much of Stephen's hard work cutting and fitting the first run of the apartments. I set it to Hyperdrive, enjoy.

Floor Plans and Pictures

I have posters, pictures, beer, pizza, magazines, newspaper, coupons, axe, menus, asian screens and floor plans!
There are also lists of all the other tiny things I have to make for each apartment. The building is still in the works, BUT it will be done shortly!
Carpeting and other cloth was picked out and purchased today as well as tile/linoleum flooring that I patterned in photoshop.