The Artist

Charm City Originals by Linda Ehrenfried

The Artist

I am a fan of all things Magical and Mythical. In my high school I was in the art majors program. The core focus was on painting but we did do sculpting progect or two. In college I took several sulpting classes. Life size portrait sculpting in Terra cotta clay and a stone sculpting class. Two kids late I decided to open my own business as it would allow me to set my own hoours an dbe with my kids while still earnign a living. I owned and operated my own retail gift and collectibles store for 12 years. I sold every kind of fairy, wizard and dragon, collectible dolls and everything else imaginable. I had the largest selection of fairies in the state. I had no time however for art, and missed creating but working 7 days a week left no time. My love of fairies and dolls was evident in my shopping habits for the store. It was just a matter of time before I began to create my own and the slow economy from 2006 - 2008 and a proposed rent increase gave me that opportunity .I closed my store after 12 years in business It was difficult to take, but as I found myself with lots of time and my new sculpting hobby started to turn into something. I messed the less and less. I have heard many artists say they were inspired to try sculpting after seeing another artists amazing OOAK fairies. I had a similar experience. I saw my very first OOAK piece I saw was in Dolls magazine, I sold it in my store. But in 2008 when I saw this amazing Angel sitting on a pedestal by Karen Williams Smith I knew that was what I should be doing. It was so amazingly beautiful I said to my daughter. If I could do that I wouldn't do anything else. I ordered a Tutorial DVD from Patricia Rose, Pat Creagar, Wendy Froud, and Jack Johnson and 2 years later, the better half of which has been spent sculpting, these are my OOAK sculptures I hope you like them. They are sculpted from a mix of polymer clays over wire armatures. I have explored many methods of making fairies. These are the hand made art dolls that I have created over the last year and a half. These are PURE sculpts meaning No molds were used in the creation of them. I do make many dolls and ornaments with my own hand made and used to use commercial molds (made by Patricia Rose) to sell at craft shows and flea markets, but the ones pictured on this site are all sculpted by hand. I do not list the others here on the site yet. I may at some point but for now this site is about my OOAK dolls only.

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Maryland Artist Linda Ehrenfried

Sculptor, Painter, and Multi media crafter

These are some of the Dvd and videos I used as i developed my skills.

Philippe Faraut DVD's: Volume 1 Portraits and Volume 2 Expressions and Facial Features (my favorite)

Jodi & Richard Creager Videos: Sculpting the Head, Sculpting Hands, Sculpting Feet and Legs and Constructing Armatures

Patricia Rose DVD's: Sculpting hands and feet, Sculpting Fairies, Advanced Sculpting Faces, Sculpting Baby Fairies actually I bought all 6 of them.

Jack Johnston DVD's Making Artdolls, Artdoll Costumes, Making Doll Heads, Sculpting and Costuming Santa Claus

Wendy Froud DVD Creating a Faery Figure (I Highly recommend this one)

Secrist - Baby Sculpting and reborning DVDs.

Kori Butts - Online class - How to sculpt a child doll in polymer clay.

These books were very helpful while I was learning:

Edward Lanteri "Modelling and Sculpting the Human Figure" Great techniques

Philippe Faraut "Portrait Sculpting" He is so amazingly talented

Maureen Carlson "How to make clay character" very cute little all clay characters

Katherine Dewey "Creating Life-Like Figurines in Polymer Clay"

Sarah Simblet "Anatomy for the Artist"

Gary Faigin "Facial Expressions"

Plus about 1000 tutorials from some very talented artists all over the world who post them on their websites and youtube.

I have not been able to actually take any classes or go to any seminars yet but I plan to in the future. The work found on this site is raw and as with my skills still a work in progress. I hope you like what I am doing and will keep coming back to see what my next learning adventure will do for my sculpting skills.

Picture of me from 1986

Many of my fairies have this face shape. It is one of my favorite pictures out of the very few pictures of me that I ever allowed to be taken at that age(16). I use it often when sculpting.