Edgar Allan Poe as a fuzzy, needle-felted cuddlebunny

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Designing these little characters for runredrun to turn into fuzzy little felts is the easy part of the equation. It takes just a few minutes to sketch out something that looks half-decent, but a week or more to turn all that raw wool into something cute. And I think this little Poe feltie is pretty cute. Runredrun actually made him look even more distraught and forlorn. A perfect state for Poe. Ok, let's cover all the bases now:

In case you don't know who Poe is, here's Wikipedia to the rescue. 

In case you haven't read much Poe, here's a smattering of his work.

In case you didn't see John Cusack playing Poe with a Van Dyke this spring, here's the IMDB page for The Raven. I saw it opening weekend and, frankly, it was entertaining enough that I didn't complain the whole way home. Maybe I'm easy to please.

Finally, here's James Mason narrating this very creepy animated version of The Tell-Tale Heart from 1953. Watch it with the lights out!

But if you already know about all that stuff and you just want to see 4 or 5 more photos of this needle-felted Poe, check out runredrun's gallery. -v

Avengers, Assemble! Hulk...Smoosh?

In anticipation of the release of the Avengers movie this weekend, RunRedRun has taken my cartoony Hulk designs and turned them into a very angry, very fuzzy Incredible Hulk fiber art doll. He's big, too. Probably the largest felted wool doll RunRedRun has put together. He stands 11 inches tall but -- get this -- his arms move! In an arcing, "Hulk Smash" sort of way, his arms are hinged so he can properly show his rage. And with his arms raised above his head he's about 14 inches tall.

Below you can see some very rough design sketches and a collection of potential faces to choose from. My friend at RunRedRun chose the classic Hulk grimace and turned those rough sketches into the fuzzy behemoth you see in these early photos.

To ramp up for the Avengers movie, check out RunRedRun for more photos. And until the movie comes out, you can amuse yourself with my uber-geeky, goofball, action figure recreation below. -v 

The details surrounding the death were fuzzy.

Hey, my cute little Grim Reaper design is now a cute little Grim Reaper felted-wool fiber sculpture courtesy of runredrun. This woolen angel of death has a removable scythe that you can stalk your friends with (crafted by me out of paper, sticks and unchecked nihilism) and it goes up for sale this month at Spookytime Jingles. It's a great gift for anyone who'd love a little reminder of their mortality sitting on their desk every day. -v

How's About A Fuzzy Zombie?

A fuzzy zombie is not a new mixed drink. It's another felted art doll design I did for runredrun. Just a little zombie out for a stroll. The woolen version of this little guy is on sale right now at SpookyTime Jingles. The perfect gift to come shambling out of a stocking, hungry for brains, this Christmas morning. -v

Happy Hallowe'en!

From the entire staff here at Vince Dorse Studios, from the custodial staff to the accountants, from the concept department on up to the illustration bigwigs, we want to wish our thousands of loyal blog followers a very spooky Hallowe'en.

That means Happy Halloween to all six of you from me and the cat.

Since this is the big Halloween weekend and most people are already squeezing into their sexy zombie costumes, or sexy firefighter costumes, or sexy spongebob costumes, this post probably won't get a lot of play until Monday morning. But I'll break down this scarecrow illustration anyway because my Saturday nights are an abyss of loneliness and boredom. Thanks for the invitation to the costume party, everybody I know! And I was even going to wear my sexy illustrator costume.

You may notice the illustration on the left here is roughed up to look vintage, but I didn't really break that down in the work-in-progress images. In case you're interested, it's basically just a lot of painting in wrinkles. Seriously. Not much to it. For all the steps leading up to that, you can follow along with the images below.

The whole concept of the Pumpkinhead Scarecrow was created as a doll design for runredrun. Under my work-in-progress steps you'll find images of my original design as well as a photo of the finished, wool art doll. He's sweet and he's spooky. And if you want to see more of his ilk, you can head over to runredrun.com and check out all the other little monsters.

More Monsters Find Loving, Haunted Homes

The best part about designing these felted art dolls for runredrun.com is that I don't have to do any of the heavy lifting. I come up with a concept, I draw a sketch, I email it to my friend and ba-boom! it gets turned into a cute, creepy little wool sculpture you can set on your desk, bookshelf or mantle. Yeah, mantle. They're that classy.

My mummy design was turned into a felted art doll last month at runredrun.com as well as the little vampire you may remember from my previous post. Just this past week, both the mummy and vampire ended up being adopted into a loving home of monster fans. If you enjoy these little guys as much as I do, you should follow the runredrun blog to see all the new monsters as they're created, some work-in-progress images, a gallery full of cute, creepy creatures and info on which ones are for sale. Happy Halloween. -v

Vun! Vun Vool Vampire! Ah ah ah...

I was out buying art supplies and stumbled upon a tiny, wooden coffin. I knew if I designed a tiny, little vampire to stuff into it I could convince my friend at runredrun.com to sculpt it. So I bought the coffin, sketched out the very simple design you see here and gave them to my friend.

She accepted the challenge and -- though the spats and collar were wisely dumped for a number of reasons -- she recreated my design in felted wool and he's even cuter than my original sketch. You can see a few more of my friends Halloween-themed creations and runredrun.com as well as details on where to buy these little cuties.

Inside info: If the suspense was killing you and you want to know the truth, the spats looked like sweatsocks so that design element was dumped right away. As for the collar, the vampire's head was so enormous it completely obscured the collar. And now you know the rest of the story. -v

The Adventures of Super Pup In 3-D!

I completely forgot to post this. The third little Halloween critter from my promotional illustration was sculpted into a cute little fiber doll by my friend at runredrun. If you feel like taking a look, there are a few more photos of this little guy in the runredrun gallery.

I'm actually working on some new Halloween designs for her to turn into fiber sculptures and they'll be up on that site (and this one) soon. Only 91 days 'til Halloween! -v

Halloween Panda has been soft-sculpted (and is for sale)

Much like my Halloween Kitty (whom I discussed last month), my Halloween Panda has been sculpted out of wool by my friend at RunRedRun and is up for grabs on SpookyTime Jingles, the Halloween Artisan's blog.

It's a lot of fun seeing my drawings slowly turn into fuzzy little three-dimensional critters over the time-consuming felting process. I did a few additional design sketches to help flesh out the felted doll, but the end result is always a collaboration, style-wise. Regardless, he's pretty cute. Check him out here. -v

My Halloween Kitty Is Up For Sale

Technically, the needle-felted art-doll version of my Halloween Kitty is up for sale. As you know, every once in a while I do designs for my friend at runredrun which she then turns into adorable felted art dolls.

Well, runredrun was recently invited to be part of an artisan collective online where she's selling her creations. Visit SpookyTime Jingles and click on the runredrun avatar to see how she turned this Halloween Kitty into a very cute, very fuzzy, three-dimensional figure. And If you have the dough, go ahead and purchase it. I've seen it in person and the photos don't do it justice. Also, I can guarantee I'll be doing a few more designs for her that will end up on Spookytime Jingles, so if you're as big a fan of Halloween, hand-made goods and cute little critters as I am, check back there every month. -v

Turning Someone Into A Peanut (Christmas Wrapping Part 4)

Nothing like the Sunday Funnies with Linus and his good friend...Daryl? Here's the deal: a few years ago, as a Christmas gift, I drew good ol' Daryl into a Peanuts illustration. She loved it. So, since then, I've drawn her into a number of scenes and comics as a little Peanuts character. This year the illustration also ends up as box art on a gift from another friend: hand-felted art dolls of Linus and Daryl from runredrun. Follow along, won't you, and see all the steps it took to complete this multi-level Christmas gift.

1) First, a look back at some of the other Peanuts art I did featuring the gang's new friend, "Daryl." This first one is, of course, the skating scene at the opening of the Charlie Brown Christmas special.

2) This is another Christmasy image of Charlie Brown, Daryl and Linus hanging out at the wall. I tried to match the look of watercolor backgrounds with hand-painted cels of the characters on top, but it's all done digitally.

3) When my friend at runredrun told me she was making Linus and Daryl dolls based on my old Schulz send-ups, I knew I needed to create a new image that would work as both a framed illustration and as box art for the dolls. So I proportioned a new sketch for both purposes and started with the pencils. The pencils relied heavily on Sunday comic compositions by Charles Schulz. As usual I wanted to make it as authentic as possible. So I pored through old Peanuts collections to find just the right neighborhood scene. And, of course, the Daryl character is basically a Peanuts girl in a blonde wig. You just don't mess with good design.

4) So the next step was inking the pencils. I did it digitally in Photoshop, but tried to use that same loose, sometimes shaky inking style that Schulz was known for. Again, authenticity is the key.

5) I continued aping the Peanuts look by picking colors found in the actual comics -- or close to them, anyway. I liked it, but I thought giving it that roughed-up, newspaper look would give it a warmer feel.

6) So I aged it. I used the halftone screen filter for all the colors, giving it that old printing press feel. And, to complete that effect, I knocked the colors off-register to fake the look of printing plates slipping during the press process. Now onto the "wrapping" part of this project.

7) As I said before, I set this project up so that it could be used as a printed illustration and box packaging. So I placed the box package template over the illustration in order to see where my text would go.

8) Finding a font online that mimicked Charles Schulz' unique lettering was fairly easy. So I downloaded it and created the masthead for the doll packaging.

9) Finally, here are the dolls, standing near their packaging. I love the look of these dolls and the way the label turned out. These will be a great surprise for Daryl come Christmas morning (as long as she stays off my blog until then).

For more shots of the finished dolls as well as some work-in-progress shots, you can read a fun and informative post over at runredrun. Happy Holidays! -v

The Headless Horseman Howls A Happy Halloween To You!

Happy Halloween. Hope you had a spooky one. Here's another wool doll design I did for my friend over at runredrun. It's my old friend, the Headless Horseman. The doll was designed to be displayed headless or with an evil jack-o-lantern atop his shoulders. Below are some work-in-progress steps for the concept illustration and the photo of the finished doll.

First step in the illustration is a pencil sketch on paper, as usual. Like I've mentioned before, I'm partial to a five-fingered hand, but the fiber artist wanted to work with the more cartoony four-fingered hand. Fine by me. He's a ghost anyway, so who knows how many fingers he had?

Here I've finished inking the sketch (digitally) and started to paint in some color. Standard hard-edged brush in Photoshop, layered over and over to blend. I threw in a warm background knowing the Horseman would be wearing a lot of cool colors and I wanted to get a feel for the contrast early on.

Most of the figure is finished in this step, so I started beefing up the background. I wanted to echo the feeling of a page ripped from an old, dusty book so I "burned" the edges around the page with a textured brush in a dark umber, low opacity. I also threw in a passage from the Washington Irving tale on a layer behind the illustration.

The "yellowed page" look was ok, but not intense enough. So I doubled the "burned edges" layer and painted in a light glow around the figure to separate him from the page. This looked just about finished. So I tossed in a little noise, added a logo (see top of post) and there you have it. One vengeful hessian and his grimacing gourd.

And here is the finished doll. I think it's a pretty good 2-D to 3-D translation. You can see a few more pictures of the doll in the gallery at runredrun.wordpress.com. Enjoy. -v

The Doctor Is In…sane!

Here's another wool doll design I did for a friend that turned into a very cool piece of 3-D art. This time it's a warm and fuzzy version of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A fantastic story that seems forever-relevant.

The photograph is, of course, the finished doll done by my friend. It's a pretty elaborate doll and it took long enough to construct that I started feeling guilty about designing so many details into it. But the finished piece is worth it. The good doctor has a collared shirt with a cravat, a vest, a tails coat lined in purple to match the vest, cuffed trousers and, so help me, spats. I love spats. If I could somehow bring spats back into popular fashion, I would. No other article of clothing seems to capture that air of elegance and utter nonsense.

If you'd like to see more images of the doctor and his alter ego, visit the gallery on the runredrun blog. Don't forget to check out the work-in-progress photos of the doll. And if you'd like to hire Alex Patho Jr., the skilled photographer that took these fantastic pictures, visit him at his pathophoto site.

Finally, at the bottom, I've posted some work-in-progress images for my design. Those are my first pencil sketches (and subsequent ink line) for Jekyll and Hyde. Early on, Hyde was slightly more human than he turned out to be in the end (and, curiously, somewhat muppet-like). But as my friend constructed the doll, we kept pushing for him to look more monstrous. "Make his teeth bigger!" I'd say, or "Lose the whites of the eyes so they look like cold, dead shark's eyes." Somehow, though, as his cranial proportions became more distorted and his facial features more extreme, he got, well, cuter. And isn't that really the most dangerous kind of beast? One that hides his murderous intentions behind a disarming veil of cutesy-tootsy? -v

Now You See Him, Now You Don't

It's October, and Halloween is on its way. So I can finally start posting some of these monster-themed images I've been stockpiling during the summer.

A little history: The first "grown-up" book I ever read as a child was H.G. Wells' Invisible Man. I read it before I ever caught Claude Rains unravelling himself in the 1933 film. So the inspiration behind this illustration is one part Rains to three parts overactive imagination of a 10-year old who's suddenly afraid to go down into his family's laundry room for fear there's a homicidal invisible man lurking in the shadows.

Now if, at first, this seems like an unconventionally cute and cuddly Invisible Man to have sprung from those memories, then mission accomplished. It was intended to be cute and cuddly because it's one of the doll designs I've been doing for a fiber artist friend of mine.

I've already posted my designs for her Red Riding Hood and Granny Wolf art dolls. But this time I'm also posting the finished Invisible Man doll. That's him in the photos in both "visible" and "invisible" stages. That isn't me goofballing around with Photoshop either. Right from the beginning I thought it would be fun to design an Invisible Man doll that really turned invisible. Sort of like a horror/sci-fi action figure made out of wool. I really like the way it turned out.

And, apparently, I'm not the only one who likes this doll. The friend who constructed it entered it in the Living Felt International Felting Contest (2010) and nailed a Third Place Win! Woo-hoo! Chalk up another long-range benefit to my childhood nightmares! I'll be posting more of these doll designs over the next month. But if you're itching to see more photos of the Invisible Man doll, finished versions of my Red & Wolf designs and some other fantastic wool creations, check out my friend's blog at runredrun@wordpress.com.

For anyone who enjoys seeing some of the process, I've posted some work-in-progress steps below. The first image is the quick notebook sketch/color notes I scribbled during dinner one night. Early on I still planned to give him the fake flesh nose that he has in the story, but I decided it would be too confusing -- "If he's invisible, how's come I's can see's his nose?" Idiots. The second image is just the uncolored linework. -v

Another Fiber Art Doll Design

As mentioned previously, I'm doing some doll designs for a friend of mine who is a fiber artist. This is the wolf (of Red Riding Hood lore) dressed in Granny's nightie, waiting for his snack to arrive. He'll make a nice companion piece to the Red Riding Hood I posted last week.

Oddly, while doing some research on the Red Riding Hood story, I came across this little tidbit:

"[E]arly variations of the tale differ from the currently known version in several ways...The wolf usually leaves the grandmother’s blood and meat for the girl to eat, who then unwittingly cannibalizes her own grandmother. Furthermore, the wolf was also known to ask her to remove her clothing and toss it into the fire."

Yugh! I think I'll just stick to the version I grew up with. The nice, clean, safe version where everyone's happy at the end...except the wolf, who's split open with the woodsman's axe so that Granny can climb out, unchewed, undigested and generally no worse for wear. -v

You Need Your Fiber

One of the side projects I've been working on is designing characters for a friend who is a fiber artist. What's a fiber artist? Well, there's about a dozen answers to that question, but in this case my friend works with various fibers and fabrics to create three-dimensional sculptures or art dolls that you can sit on a shelf or throw at your cat.

The best part of this job? So far I've got complete carte blanche as far as the designs go. One of the first ones I worked on was this little Red Riding Hood. My only directive? She wanted it simple and cute. Done. I don't have the photos of the completed doll yet (and her website is still down while it gets a revamp) but until I can point you elsewhere, keep an eye out here for my other designs. -v