Monday 22 July 2013

Contrast colours

I seem to have embarked on a series of patterned bears recently. Having made a Panda, I then went on to make a bi-colour bear from brown and cream Alpaca, not a Panda but with a distinct colour division in his body and contrasting patches on his paws.

The latest is a black and cream bear, again made from dense short Alpaca.  I wanted to keep more black overall so the contrast on his body is quite a small area and his limbs are all one colour. I tried to reflect the proportion and general shape of the contrast from his head in a special shaped patch on his chest.

The patch on his snout is tapered into his forehead and the fur scissor sculpted to add shape around his mouth.
 As usual with this pattern he is designed to stand quite comfortably and the short fur helps show the shapes and make quite crisp divisions between the colours.

This one is called Gregory at the request of his new owner

Monday 8 July 2013

Computers and things

My new PC is now up and running, I have rescued a lot of things from the old one including the layout and software which I use for my website so my for sale bears will be located back on the website.  I prefer to keep the business side of bears on the main website and the blog for more rambling thoughts about bear matters and more personal things.

Just a reminder my website is www.hugoshouse.com

I am also now investigating ways of handling my mailing list including a service called Mail Chimp.  I try to make sure my updates reach everybody but I know that some people have very tight filtering either on their computers or at their web servers.  Almost very time I send out an update i get at least one complaint a few days later from someone who has visited the website and realised they didn't get an update message; It is very difficult to cover every eventuality, Mail Chimp is widely used and accepted but it is still possible that over jealous mail filters will reject my messages.

My normal business mail address is gregory@hugoshouse.com but I also use a g.mail account, so if you see mail from grufflybear@g.mail that is also a genuine message.  I am testing the Mail Chimp system and it will produce a message addressed individually and show me as the sender.