Learning Journey - Trip to USA! 6 - 11 April 2018

It felt so good to be back in USA again this year! The weather seemed to be a little much colder but it marked a new exciting year for Wayne, having the courage to travel alone on a 24-hour flight! This showed that nothing could stop him from fulfilling his dream to become a great toy designer and bear artist!

Wayne felt so lucky when his name was called by the airport attendant, as he received a Free Upgrade to Business Class! He felt like a king on his flight which made it very enjoyable, despite the long journey.

Wayne was also very excited to meet his mentor and best friend, Joanne Livingston again. Learning from one of the very best Teddy Bear Artist in the world felt like a dream. He knows there is no returning, the only way to show gratitude to his mentor is to become better, pass on his knowledge and share the joy of bear making to the next generation and promoting the Art of Teddy Bear making.

Working on centaur horns

Wayne the Manicurist

Adding colours to bear noses

This trip was not exactly a holiday for Wayne. He worked hard for three full days to complete his gallery piece and made claws for his realistic bears before the show at Susan Quinlan Doll & Teddy Bear Convention. Joanne taught Wayne different colouring techniques to create beautiful tones for the bear claws and shadings for bears' faces.

Joanne and Wayne

Besides spending most of the time working with bears, Joanne and her husband, David brought Wayne to Renningers and Adamstown at Pennsylvania for antiquing! They knew Wayne loves antiques and the group spent almost a full day doing that! Wayne is fascinated when he came close face-to-face to two life size black bears taxidermy in the store. He took pictures and observed closely to the way a bear face and body is built proportionally, this definitely gave him a better idea next time when he would design realistic bears.

Wayne bought a vintage Steiff Chimpanzee toy and some doll clothes during his trip.

On Wednesday, Joanne's niece, Jillian Reeves bought him to Micheals, one of the biggest Craft store in town! The store is amazing, there are many brands and a vast variety of craft supplies that you could not find in Singapore. What a very exciting place to be in! During Wayne's stay at Jillian's house, he shared with Jillian, ways to pose her bears and setting up the right environment to photograph her bears using natural outdoor lights.

Wayne would like to take this opportunity to thank Joanne and David for teaching and hosting him. Plus Jillian and her mum, Mary for making him feel at home when he stayed with them.

We look forward to our trip to USA again next year!

Hugs,

Wayne

Learning Journey in USA (Part 1) ~ Making a Realistic Bear with Joanne Livingston

Joanne Livingston is one of the best realistic bear artist based in USA. She has been making bears for more than 30 years! Her bears are all very highly sought after and highly priced due to all the intricate details she has given to a bear to make them realistic. Her techniques are extremely time consuming especially since she gave her bears needle felted faces and later root fur onto the felted faces. To enhance the realism, armatures were built internally so that her bears can pose as close to look like real ones.

Wayne has known Joanne for more than 7 years; from the very beginning when he first started bear making. Joanne has been his mentor as well as very best friend. Her works have been the greatest inspiration to Wayne to becoming a good bear artist. We have discussed for a long long time that we will visit USA one day to learn from Joanne.

Taken at the Philadelphia Airport. L- R: Philip, Wayne, David and Joanne

The day finally came that we did go. Joanne and her husband, David came to the airport and brought us to stay with them for 4 nights so that we can learn to make a realistic bear from her.

Joanne is a very experienced teacher. She has carefully planned all the instructions for us before we arrived. Prior to our arrival, we have sewn all the parts of the bear and applique all the paws and foot pads.

Joanne taught us how to build a lockline armature, how to needle felt the bear's face as well as rooting fur onto the face.

One of the challenges Wayne faced was rooting fur onto the bear's face. Extremely time consuming, each piece of fur need to be unraveled from the mohair fabic, sorted before rooting the good ones onto the bear's face. When rooting the fur, you need to observe the flow direction of the fur as well to determine the spaces between each fur. The angle which you insert the felting needle is also crucial. The whole process takes time and patience to complete. We really salute Joanne for all her determination and passion.

Due to the lack of time, Wayne and Philip managed to complete felting the face and worked on rooting only 1 side of the eyes. Joanne also showed us how to needle sculpt the paws and foot pads and later using colours to add shadings.

Work in progress bear.

Besides making a bear, Joanne also showed how to make a doll wig for Wayne's cute little doll, made by Nikki Britt!

Of course, we did have some fun time walking the puppies, Piko and Thor every morning! We are glad that they both liked us!

On the weekend, we visited the art flee market down the street.

After the many days of lessons, we are both confident that everything that we have learnt would be very useful for our future creations.

We want to specially thank our mentor Joanne for her time and patience for coaching us as well as her husband, David, for hosting us.

As a token of appreciation, Wayne gave Joanne one of his handmade squirrel, Chestnut.

We hope you enjoyed reading our learning journey :)

P.S: Like and follow Joanne's pages on Facebook!

https://www.facebook.com/Desertmountainbear/

https://www.facebook.com/DesertMountainDoll/

Hugs,

Wayne & Philip

We are home! Learning Journey in USA

Greetings everyone! We are finally back home! We were away for 2 weeks as we traveled to USA! It was a long journey, taking us 22 hours in total flight time from Singapore!

Thankfully, we had a transfer in London after 13 hours which allowed us to get down from the plane to ease our stiff necks and legs.

In the next few blog posts, we are going to share our learning journey in USA. We still find it hard to believe that we learned from Masters in Bear Making Industries. Wayne and Philip took a private class from Joanne Livingston, and learned from Michelle Lamb during her workshop conducted at the Susan Quinlan Doll and Bear Convention. Not only that, we are so honored to be able to personally visit the R John Wright Studios and Kelly Dean.

This trip to USA is not a holiday for us, our main objective is to learn advance techniques from different teachers as well as to participate in the Susan Quinlan Doll & Bear Convention.

We will be writing much on our adventures and we hope you will enjoy reading our learning journey. 

Hugs,

Wayne & Philip

Thank you for visiting us at the Susan Quinlain Doll & Bear Convention! =)

Thank you to all our friends who came and visited our table last week at the Susan Quinlan Doll & Bear Convention! We are very pleased that 10 of our creations had found new homes! Thank you for your support! We are in the midst of sorting out the pictures and will be writing a review of the convention. 

Please stay tune for our next update!


Cheers,
Wayneston Studios & Team

We are all packed and ready to go!

Wayneston bears will be participating in the

Susan Quinlan Doll & Bear Convention on May 4 - 6, 2017
Venue: Clarion Hotel & Convention Center
USA, Philadelphia

We will be displaying our Bears and other Critters at the show.
Pop by to say hi to us!

For more info about the show visit:
http://www.quinlanmuseum.com/convention.html

See you at Philadelphia!

Hugs,
Wayne

4 new bears ready for Philly Show!

Hooray! We are so glad to have another 4 additional bears ready to join us for our trip to USA! Counting down 10 more days!!! Whoooo Hooo!

We are so looking forward to meeting our Facebook friends, namely Joanne Livingston, Kelly Dean, Lisa Heiland, Ginger Brame, Tyler Crain-Davis, Michelle Lamb and many more!

We are also excited that we will be making our trip to R John Wright Studios as well to visit their factory! And of course, attending bear-making classes taught by two famous teachers.(Will announce the names later!)

Hope you like our new bears below!

Have a great week ahead!

Cheers,
Wayne

Trevor and Teddey

Lovee

Star Gazer