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
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
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
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
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
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
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 Furbirds are winged meerkats from Reptangle(tm), my forever unpublished comic, so that puts them in the same category as the Lion Kirin and the Poads(tm), meaning that they have more meaning in the context of the story.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
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
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
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
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
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
This is “April” the Windstone forum raffle prize for April. This is a test painted Lap dragon that has been painted over so many times her detail has begun to fill in, but she is still very pretty in her various shades of copper, ruby, gold and deep red. She has probably been painted by … Read more
Last night I went over to a new friend’s house and found a Windstone in her living room! It belonged to her roommate, who had owned it for years. They were both excited to find out it was my mom who made it. This sort of thing happens all the time. My boyfriend’s mother had … Read more
The Gothic Unicorn is a great mystery. If you are unfamiliar with this piece, The “Gothic Unicorn” is a funny looking goat-like unicorn sculpture, with a poofy llama tail. He is retired in the white color, but I had always intended to paint him in other colors. The mystery about him is…what happened to him? … Read more
