Amethyst curlie color
This is the way I painted a first batch ( about sixty) curlies. Unfortunately, I see that this picture I took doesn’t show the intense violet part very well, but I painted these in a compromise color between the two curlies pictured in the blog entry titled “Amethyst Dragons”. The top coil of the curlie … Read more
Close encounter of the Windstone kind – coincidence or omen?
On my first tour of Windstone Edition’s new Northwest production facility, John Alberti (the mechanical wizard behind Melody Pena’s superb figurines) led me up a flight of carpeted stairs, where a stack of Harry Potter books had come to rest permanently on the third step, to the large room that serves as the design studio … Read more
Restocking and gypsum
We are just now starting to work on production painting again! Restocking our depleted piles of inventory is a milestone in our settling-in process. The problem is … I don’t know how to do the production painting very well, so teaching someone else is an issue! It has been about twenty years since I have … Read more
Is it live, or is it Melodys?
I have described Melody Peña, the artistic creator of all things Windstone, as a naturalist to the imaginary world. But she does amazingly well in the real world too. Proof of this came to me in the rotund form of a guinea pig. I took my 11-year-old daughter, Tam, on a cross-town pilgrimage to Windstone … Read more
Windstone is…
Pendragon writes… Blogging about fantasy figurines is an unusual business. I suppose that shouldn’t come as a surprise. In journalism school, they didn’t offer tips for covering the dragon-griffin-gargoyle beat. The biggest surprise about this fantasy endeavor is how un-fanciful Melody Peña and John Alberti are. Melody is as much a naturalist as she is … Read more
Mythology biology – or how to build an imaginary bestiary
Pendragon writes… Mix up a few facts, and you end up with a fantasy. Mix up a few animal parts – as Melody frequently does – and you end up with fantasy figurines. Of course, Melody is not the first to mix and match heads and wings and beaks and claws. The practice is ancient … Read more
The joy of BS
Certainly you all know that the biggest asset of a fantasy artist is the ability to successfully BS your way around impossible anatomy. I have drawn a very inaccurate anatomical illustration here, of the hopelessly illogical anatomy of my winged lion. See how logical it looks? Right. That is the power of BS at work. … Read more
Water kitties
I’ve got zillions of sketches, both drawings and 3d mock-ups of ideas I would like to do as Windstone pieces in the future. I haven’t been showing many of these ideas because I am so behind in sculpting, it seems crazy to think about new sculpture that when I have over a dozen half-finished sculptures … Read more
Furbird sculpture and ™s
These are “furbirds”. Furbirds are winged meerkats from Reptangle(tm), my forever unpublished comic, so that puts them in the same category as the Lion Kirin and the Poads(tm), meaning that they have more meaning in the context of the story. The drawing is one of the characters from Reptangle ™. The photo image is a … Read more
Bourkes Parakeet Poad(tm) Painted by Helen (this blog is written by Helen too!)
I got to paint a poad(tm)! And immortalize my little Bourkes parakeet Archimedes at the same time. Bourkes parakeets are a type of grass parakeet from Australia. They do a lot of foraging on the ground, in the grass (hence their name) and she lives true to that by running around on the floors in … Read more
The meaning of art.
I’m sitting here burning my lips on some really hot coffee, and I’m confident that you want to know this. I’m thinking about the internet’s social network sites, and art, and realizing that they serve the same function for me. They both address the same question I crave to have answered. This is the reason … Read more
The colors of Nature
Since I am often too skilled in creating confusion, I will try to abate it early on- this blog entry is written by Windstone artist Jennifer Miller. I, like nearly every other artist upon this earth, am inspired heavily by the natural world. There are more crazy things in nature than our imaginations can come … Read more
Do griffins have nipples?
Ouch. More fun with fantasy animals. In addition to coming up with convincing BS anatomy for them, you also get to invent their whole natural history! I did this drawing of a hatchling griffin about thirty years ago, and started working on the problems about how they have babies. I took the easy way out … Read more
An off-leash park for your brains!!
My previous blog “The meaning of art” touches on another facet of the same thought, though I didn’t really discuss it: That art is defined by YOU, the artist. Do you agree? With this in mind, I will now put forth my thoughts on the matter of Modern art; in defense of the most obnoxious, … Read more
