The Things They Call ‘Art’ These Days
When I was a kid, toys were toys, cartoons were cartoons, and monsters were monsters. Simple childhood concepts. But, as it turns out, you can now make a posable action figure of a Scooby Doo monster, call it an art doll, and hardly anybody looks at you sideways.
Gathering the parts and pieces of a creep.
So that’s what Michelle and I did this week. We grabbed some Cosclay, paint, stuffing, and fabric and tried to recreate one of my favorite cartoon monsters from childhood, The Creeper, from the Scooby Doo episode, Jeepers, It’s The Creeper!
Velma can’t keep her mitts off The Creeper.
Wikipedia will tell you that art dolls are “objects of art, rather than children's toys, created in a wide variety of styles and media, and may include both pre-manufactured parts or wholly original works.” So yeah, this big, green goon in the ill-fitting suit technically fits the bill.
“Pardon me, have you seen any meddling kids about?”
Of course, we’ve only worked on a handful of art dolls. Michelle and I are still honing our skills and learning new ones. There are folks who have been creating art dolls for decades and have turned out beautiful pieces that inspire and amaze.
Speaking about inspiring and amazing…
So, by comparison, while Creeper may not be ‘high art’ — and viewing the above image of Creeper’s epoxy clay buttocks you understand we aren’t fooling ourselves about that — we’re still really happy he turned out as we’d planned; a slightly creepy, slightly cartoony, late-60s-inspired reject from a Rankin&Bass stop motion Halloween special. And we can’t wait to make more.
“I’m a doll, Susan! Pick me up and cuddle me!”
It occurred to me while writing this post, that before we ever knew anything about this stuff, one of the first projects that Michelle and I collaborated on, years ago, was a needle-felted art doll of The Invisible Man (my design, her hard work) that actually won a prize in Art Doll Quarterly.
Not photo-trickery. We built in the invisibility function.
So maybe, knowing what we know now, having learned what we’ve learned, if we really apply ourselves, we may also come up with something that can inspire and amaze. If you wanna get in on the ground floor of that process, you can watch this week’s video to see how we built this creep from scratch.