windstone's blog

Its hot. And I had a beer. So I was looking around for a different subject to draw, and decided to draw the toilet tank, because it is pretty cool sitting backwards on the toilet in the bathroom with a beer.

I haven't had time to write about whats going on in the Windstone factory lately!
We have been working hard to re-learn everything from casting to paint color mixing. It is very frustrating work.
I took some photos of our three long-suffering painters. These people deserve a round of applause for putting up with everything!
Winnie is the newest painter. She has turned out to be great at hand painting the most difficult-to-paint dragons, which are the hatching ones!

I have been experimenting with transparent glaze-like finishes for years. They look really great but they always run and make puddles at the bottom of the piece. I managed to get around this problem on this flegeling by holding him in my hand and rotating him until the finish dried.
That won't work in production, but this guy looks neat! The finish looks just like a clear turquoise celadon glaze, like the real ceramic glazes you might see on Chinese porcelain.He has silver trim. His light blue eyes look grey here because his body color is so intense.

...you are probably wrong.

Since the website "Snopes" became the ultimate source for truth... I now have come to accept that 99.9 percent of everything I thought... is wrong. The "Great Wall" is not the only man made thing visible from space ( I guess I could of figured that one out myself if I had though about it). The Earth isn't round. A Nautilus shell is not in the form of a perfect "Golden spiral".

There are allot of finished or almost finished pieces that I have sculpted for Windstone that we have never produced. Sometimes they are just finished sculpture, but sometimes they nearly reach the stage of being in production before we go "eh" and shelve the idea.
This chick is one of the ones we made mold on, cast a few, test painted ... and then kinda lost interest in it.

This is a photo shopped pic of three, make that four, new flapcat colors I have painted. ( I flipped the black sunset cat , he really faces the other way)
I have been painting all the flapcats I can find around here. We have quite a few of the eye shut ones, so I have painted a batch of them in orange and white. The eye open ones are painted in Orange tabby and tuxedo with black sunset wings. The tuxedo cat shown here has allot of black on him, but I have also painted some of these with much more white on the undersides.

This is our backyard at the Windstone factory in Corvallis Oregon. Isn't it great? There is a little creek if you keep going towards the big trees. The creek feeds into the Mary's river, which is at the end of our street.

This is "Wild Plum", the raffle prize for May!

He was an Amethyst colored Oriental dragon that got a wild hair and turned out a coppery plum color.
He is one of the test paints I did for a "Copper Plum" color I am working on. This is a experimental color combination sort of like the lighter "Copper Lilac" dragons I goofed-up awhile back. I like copper and violet together, and I want to use these colors in some combination as a dragon color in the future.

This Wild Plum color uses the violet as a darker shade color rather than as a lighter accent color like the copper lilacs.

I think carts of finished product is a lovely sight. It is so nice to see stuff getting finished! I thought these bobcats looked so cute all laid out like cupcakes on a bakery rack.
The packing department is starting to be filled with product, but even this last stage of the finishing process is a learning experience. The packers are trying to figure out how to glue eyes into cat candle lamps without getting glue all over the eyes, and many of our molds have shrunk so the eye sockets need enlarging.

Doesn't everyone ?

I have made foil creatures since I was in kindergarten. My mom started me on this hobby by teaching me how to make ducks. Ducks are made by rolling a piece of foil around your finger with the open seam up. You pinch the end into a duck head, remove the foil from your finger, pinch the open end into an upturned duck tail, gently flatten the bottom a bit and then they can float in water!