So in another article, I mentioned learning how to roller skate during the pandemic as part of something I had always wanted to try but was too worried about embarrassing myself to try, but my focus in this writing is about rediscovering old hobbies. 

Growing up my skill set was always in arts, as a child I was obsessed with drawing and sculpting and for a while, I thought I would be a stop motion artist one day. Kids change their minds though and I changed “what I wanted to be when I grow up” several times before I was even out of grade 9.

I was serious about sculpture and illustration in the years leading up to graduation, in many ways art became the only thing I liked, and I expanded my horizons into fabric and foam costume building, and I even had a lot of work done on a comic book of my own that I had at least made it to an IP lawyer for. 

When I went into university though, everything was different. Suddenly I wasn’t one of a handful of prodigious young artists in my high school I was just a regular art student with dreams that were seemingly too big for my skillset. I also couldn’t draw a background to save my life and that’s kind of a necessity if you want to draw comic books. 

I ended up going into my university’s film program and that’s where I discovered that I was actually pretty decent at coming up with ideas, and I liked how much work went into the process of making films. It turns out what I really love is telling stories and much of what I learned, even in those fruitless endeavors built up skills that I still use today.

But art school as I came to learn was not always the artistically free landscape they tell you it is, like definitely there can be some really out there, bizarre projects that art students come up with but the concept is right and the execution is too, you’re golden. 

There are however things people really didn’t like. One area I’ve always been fascinated with is toy design, as a kid, I loved dolls, action figures, and animal toys, and if I wasn’t satisfied with what I had sometimes I made figures out of clay. In the age of the internet, something started to really catch my eye and that was artists doing “repaints” of dolls or My Little Pony and I was blown away that someone could turn a pink girl horse into one of the brother Clydesdales with just a bit of clay and some paint.

What I found from seeing artists online documenting their process of how they turned one toy into something completely different is that I learned a lot about materials that I would have never otherwise learned about in school or on my own. For example, the “clay” you use on a vinyl pony toy isn’t really clay because most clays need to be baked and I don’t know if you ever stuck a My Little Pony in the oven before, but vinyl melts. 

Instead what these artists liked using is a home and hardware product called “epoxy putty” and it’s essentially a two-part epoxy glue but in a putty form. You mix the two parts together as you would the liquid glue but it cures without having to go into the oven. It’s literally perfect for what I was doing but I never would have learned about it if not for the internet, because it’s less of an art supply and more of a plumber’s product (there are hobbyist brands as well).

At the end of the day though I was a film major, and there wasn’t really much use for my toy customizing. Even if there was I was largely too afraid to talk about it because really what 21-year-old is interested in dolls and toys? As I also learned there are a million criticisms you can make about the human body and the plastic representation thereof, and sometimes people don’t want to hear about the ways you’re trying to make it different or subvert and that’s just the way it is.

 (I built the leg from epoxy putty)

So I kept it to myself, and where I couldn’t find the support in real life for my modified toys but there are a lot of toy modifying communities on the internet and I found myself with a healthy subscriber count on my doll Tumblr. It felt great to have support from people who liked what I was doing but also the people who in my eyes were also talented artists. I felt like I was in a happy space of being able to have recognition for my skills but also where I could share my tips with other new artists and I loved it.   

(Below is work from of my favorite artists from the Tumblr era to now)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CKRpJdnJ79k/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

I graduated in 2018 and with that came a tsunami of depression from both the roughest academic year of my life and the feeling that I no longer had guidance for being an artist anymore.  My main film-oriented interests were starting to dip, I worked on a couple of productions but it didn’t spark any joy, and eventually, the apathy I felt trickled down into everything else, from cosplay to doll making, I just bottomed out.

When the pandemic hit filming obviously shut down, and I hadn’t painted a doll in probably a year but with the lockdown came the great boredom, and one day I started looking at all the parts I had the urge to create again. 

I grabbed one doll who had always just hung around but wasn’t really special to me on her own and I got to work changing her face, her hair and even giving her big epoxy putty elf ears. When I finished up I felt the weirdest feeling. For the first time in forever, I was actually happy with my own work. 

Since then I’ve tried to make time for this hobby, it doesn’t always happen the way I want it to but it makes me happy, and that happiness goes to the other areas I work in. No to equate myself or other artists to farm animals, but happy artists make better art, so always try to make time for your own projects too.