ADO Featured Artist: Wooded Woods
This week's interview is with Kamila, of Wooded Woods.
(originally appeared on the ADO blog)
Please tell us about yourself. What is your name? Where do you live? What makes you tick?
My name is Kamila Mlynarczyk, I currently reside in Kitchener, Ontario with my husband and a small band of pets. We have two cats, Oscar and Pickles, and the sweetest brown lab named Sam. I am married to my very best friend, Martin - we are still newly weds. My husband and I settled in Kitchener because of his work . What makes me tick is being bored, it makes me feel very guilty so I often occupy my time and my idle hands with sculpting while I watch tv or listen to music or anything else that requires one to sit still too long.
When did you start making dolls? Why did you start making dolls?
I discovered art dolls one afternoon (about 3 years ago) while browsing the Internet. I fell in love and was coveting a very expensive OOAK mermaid when I suddenly got the idea to try to make one myself. Being a poor university student at the time my only resource was the Internet, so I tracked down every useful tutorial I could find and started sculpting for the first time in my life. I started making art dolls and from that day on, there hasn't been a day that went by where I wasn't consumed with ideas for my dolls.
Obviously when I started I thought I was going to end up with very pretty figures, but what came out was often a bit creepy, a bit funny and very pathetic looking characters. There was no escaping it after a while and I realized that making pretty things bored me, and I could never resist giving my dolls a little extra something that made them more human to me.
Who or what influences you? Inspires you?
I am often inspired by searching out other doll artists, just seeing all the different styles, ideas and craftsmanship really inspire me to experiment with my own dolls a lot. I think that everyone I have encountered as a doll maker has given me something to think about.
My influences are often wonderful bits of fabric I find, antiques, old Victorian photographs, and beautifully illustrated children's books. I am most inspired when I am doing mundane tasks and let my mind drift, I usually keep notepaper around me so that I can jot down ideas and pictures in my head so I don't forget. This all goes into an idea book I keep, so I have never really found myself without an idea because I can always go back to the many ideas I haven't yet used. Its my greatest resource.
Tell us a little about your dolls and your process for making them. Materials, preliminary sketches, inspiration, etc. I usually have a very rough sketch, but my ideas evolve a lot as I'm working on them. I use Prosculpt for the arms, legs and bust. I sculpt all these separately, then put them together once cured on a wire armature. The midsection is wrapped in cotton batting. I paint with acrylics, I do a couple of layers of washes to add depth to the skin and then I dry brush the details of the face. After that all is left is the costume which involves a lot of layering, aging and trimming. Most of it is just an instinct the artist acquires about what feels right and what doesn't work. Do you have a favorite doll? It can be handmade by you, handmade by someone else, or even (gasp) mass production. Believe it or not I never played with dolls as a little girl, I was more of a tom boy. But I do remember the church I was christened in as a child in Poland, we had a 16th century wooden chapel in our village. The front wall was beautifully sculpted out of wood and painted with bright colours -- it was overwhelming to look at and perhaps helped influenced my love for art and sculpture. My favorite doll that I have made is Vincent and Pieter. Those were the kind of dolls that were magic and almost made themselves. With Vincent I couldn't stop- I worked through the night to finish him and I went to sleep at about 6am when we was all finished. Now that's love, lol. Besides making dolls, what do you do? Job, other creative pursuits, hobbies, etc. I do have a full time job as a graphic designer/typesetter at a small local print shop. When I'm not sculpting I'm reading at night or watching scary movies. In the summer I enjoy the outdoors but in the winter I'm pretty much a hermit locked away in my basement studio with my husband and pets --hibernating. Oh, and I love to cook and make crazy new foods to feed to my poor poor husband :) What are some of your favorite: movies, books, websites, magazines, foods, tv shows? (Any or all!) My favorite books are Enders Game by Orson Scott Card, Dune by Frank Herbert, and anything by George R.R. Martin. I also love to read anthologies, I've just finished reading "Living Dead" an anthology full of zombie stories. My favorite things to watch are any kind of cheesy horror movie, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Office and 30 Rock. As for food, I am currently obsessed with Chai tea and blueberry pancakes. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be and why? I would love to live in Spain for the wonderful seafood they get. But I'm very content in Canada, its a huge majestic country with so much to see and visit. One of my favorite places in Canada is New Brunswick, right by the ocean. I wouldn't mind visiting NB many more times over the years. Where do you see yourself in one year? Five years? Ten years? I know I'm never going to stop sculpting. Eventually I would like to quite my day job and just sculpt full time, maybe have a gaggle of children to teach and inspire... that kind of thing. Where can we find you on the internet? (blog, website, Etsy shop, eBay, et al.)
