"Untouched by the sunlight, Or the moonlight, I stand like a statue, As the stars bring their light"

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Do it yourself. DIY. A poor man's choice. An opportunity for artistic endeavor.

I have apartment full of different kinds of wood to work on and some metal-objects. At times I get an idea but mostly I look for ideas and inspirations. With zero-budget or otherwise very low starting points.

I think I might have written about this before, but when you don't have any money to spend, you can always make something from flour, baking dough, to be exact.

Couple of years back I made few baking dough-bones and bird-skull-look-a-likes for Halloween. Perhaps a person with patience and a touch for details could make better looking skulls, I just peeked at a picture and molded them to look something like that.

(About year old pictures)

Although these pictures and their use belongs solely to me, if you, my dear reader, get any kind of ideas and inspiration from these, you may of course use the ideas - but not the pictures.

Actual modelling clay or even play-dough can allow you to make a really fine, detailed and realistic work, but like I said, when you don't have money for it, and if you want decorations for a party or something to put into your jars of curiosities you can make these cheap. Also you can make small holes into the still-wet pastry and after its dry, you can put wire through and hang them on a chandelier. All you need is some fine-grained flour, water and salt. Salt is the key-element. Without it you end up with a paste that starts to stink and rot. Unfortunately I made that mistake with a mummified-hand I made. So you don't need any actual instructions, you just add equal measures of flour and water, but add more flour to keep it dry enough to handle. Also some use ovens to warm and harden the figurines, I just put flour over a newspaper and left it to dry for few days. I'm not sure if the shape changes in the oven.

Anyway, that one is a bit difficult thing to make, but like I said, if you don't have money nor imagination to try something else, it is an option.

Another idea, that I haven't yet tried, is to carve bones and skulls out of wood from forests. I have a little experience on carving wood, but in theory it sounds like an easy enough option. Just gather up some branches and whatnot and start carving. But the tree needs to be thick enough and not rotten or old. Also it needs to be completely dry.

One interesting idea I got from several different websites, that include making statues and other decorations from dolls and doll-heads. One thing I accidentally stumbled on was a practice-dollhead, for barbers and make-up artists. The difference from kids dolls is the size of the thing:

In this picture the practice-doll was painted from its natural human-like skin-colors to white. Not the most delicate colouring technique I used there, but any other person could try spray-painting to get the best, cleanest result. I used what I had. Equally I had to get creative with the hair the doll had. I cut it off the best I could, but with closer look you can see small pieces of hair sticking out. Using any razors or carpet-knifes would cause scratches on the skins surface, and they didn't get all the hair out.

Also the doll had an average head but I got an idea to make a head with its top cut off, to reveal its "brain". It kind of reminds me of one of those phrenology-heads.

There's also couple of books I tried to transform into something else, but I'm not all that happy with the results. Cardboard, and pins besides paints and hot glue were used with these.

And there's another picture I have once shared. But I got an idea, that I haven't yet tried out. Besides making octopus-figures on bottles, all other options are equally possible, but what I haven't tried, which might work even better as a 3-dimensional decoration is an actual plastic toy-octopus. Unfortunately they are hard to find and the ones I found from Ebay are surprisingly expensive for average toys. So this plan is currently on waiting-mode. But when I find a toy to hot glue on a bottle, I would probably paint it at first. I don't know how this idea might work, but hopefully I get a chance to try.

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Cabinets of curiosities are fun things to have, and I have something like it. It goes through transforms every now and then, but currently it looks like this:

There was no space to get the whole cabinet into one picture, but as you can see, it has all kinds of jars and bottles - from grocery stores, flea-markets and alcohol-stores. Printed labels (which I need more and different kinds) and more things from flea-markets, like the candle-holders. Only the skull-replicas are from Ebay. The human-skull one was the most expensive one, and it is a real treasure.

I'll add ore pictures later, like the mummified hand and a bit better looking diy-books.