Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Poppet Rainbow All The Way Across The Sky

So Many Colors In A Rainbow, available on Etsy
JPS here, aka Jessie Human aka "you're fired" aka "aaaw, you're hired."

I have been Lisa's assistant and liaison person since November.  We have been constantly busy, and yet she says "this isn't busy season."

Welp.

In November and December she was training me in the art of Poppet Painting.  I painted many poppets, but something I love about Lisa is that before it can be shipped, she personally inspects, touches up, and signs each one.  Often, she kisses their little faces.  She also kisses her paper dolls and her cats and my kids and my husband person Willie--but not in a "why is this woman kissing my husband person" kind of way.

If you've not met Lisa Snellings, let me just say that she's pretty much one of the coolest people you'll ever meet.  Hands down.  Her food, her stories, her random creative ideas that turn into something I can hold in my hand and honestly ask "so...can I have this one?"

Various works in progress. 
Once the new year hit our favorite artist got this beauty streak in her.  She got all happy and creative and she started being inspired by crap we'd find in thrift stores and anything that had anything to do with the circus.

Which includes boiled peanuts.

Which are now my favorite food ever.

Part of the reason I work at Poppet Planet is because Lisa wasn't getting enough time to work on larger projects.  Poppets are so popular and well loved, our artist was on what she called "a poppet hamster wheel" and couldn't put time into the really big ideas she has.  Now that I am on the poppet hamster wheel (and I love it, and I think I need one of those neat tube systems to go with it as well) Lisa is cookin' on the new stuff!

And I probably shouldn't talk about any of it.  But I do take studio pictures, like the one above, so feel free to take a look at them and try to decipher what is going on.  (Is that a tiny piano I see?)  

We needed rainbow poppets, she told me the other day.  She told me "Lisa's palate," because she occasionally speaks in third person--which isn't as strange as when she talks in Silence Of The Lambs (it puts the glue dot on the mat board)-- "is made of colors that have black in them.  The crimson, the winter blue, they all have black in them."  She had me look at pictures of past Rainbow Poppets to get an idea of how to do this year's.

Out of all of what I found, I liked the "classic" one best.  Probably because I enjoy the classic poppets more than the hand sculpted ones.  Then again, there are some seriously amazing hand sculpted poppets in the shop right now

I loaded up with "Lisa's Palate" friendly colors and ended up with this little dude:


I think he's adorable.  Or it.  Lisa says we try not to give them genders unless it's obvious.  Or that's her Silence of the Lambs thing again.

To me, rainbow is male.  But Lisa told me that there is a collector who sees all poppets as female.

Do you think poppets have genders?  Does it matter?  Leave a comment below. 

5 comments:

ravyn said...

i seem to remember Lisa and i talking about Poppets as if they were female. Foppets too. But that was many many years ago...

Maybe they are like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and spontaneously changed sex within a single-sex environment :-)

Carl V. Anderson said...

I probably think of my poppets as males, but I can't say I've ever given it any conscious thought before now. I would imagine it is the natural state of seeing things through the eyes of our gender when it isn't obvious.

I certainly wouldn't bother them enough to actually check...who knows what kind of revenge they might take when the lights go out for the slight on their dignity.

Carl V. Anderson said...

Oh, forgot to mention, these turned out really nice. Fun!

Weasel said...

My two poppets are females. Brigid and Morrighan.

Unknown said...

What is male and female but different sides to the same coin