Michelle Steele
Here’s another creepy/Goth inspired doll artist. Michelle Steele is known on Flickr as Darksidedolls, and the title is a fitting one. A quite versatile artist, Steele offers paintings, jewelry and needle-felted plushies as well as hard-media art dolls on her Etsy site. Although she makes well-sculpted fairy-type dolls with a Goth twist, I have to confess that it’s her creepy ornaments that captivate me. Made from a wide variety of media including papier mache, Apoxie Sculpt, porcelain, and earthen clay, these quirky figures sometimes incorporate purchased doll heads. They’re a great mix of creepy and cute.
Like many modern doll artists, Steele makes use of a plethora of Internet sites, including her personal page, a blog, an Etsy storefront and a Flickr account.
Edit: For some reason, this post gets more hits than any other post on my blog. If you got here from a search engine or bookmark, I’d like to invite you to take a look at some other blog posts you might like:
Scott Radke
I’m sending off my doll club’s entry to our Halloween show today, so it feels appropriate to blog about Scott Radke.
A talented painter, Radke turned from murals to sand sculpture a few years ago, and from there to sculpting what he calls “marionettes.” His work has that creepy-strange quality that’s so popular in certain quarters these days, both repellent and fascinating. While other people make mermaids and fairies, he makes sea monsters and weird human-headed animals.
Somewhere I have a graphic design book that includes a color palette based on the colors found in dead bodies. Radke captures that palette perfectly and combines it with traditionally creepy details, like pointy hats and black-and-white stripes. I wonder what Halloween is like at his house…
