2018: The Year it All Began
April 2018,
I sat on my living room couch kneading a small ball of polymer clay.
My partner had been battling some vicious flu symptoms all day and his fever was rising with the moon. To tame my anxiety, I worked the clay into various shapes, eventually setting on something that vaguely looked like a mushroom man. Then another morphed into a four-legged mushroom.
After his fever finally broke and he seemed to be out of the worst of it, I baked the first 8 figures that would later come to be known as “Funguise.”
But why mushrooms? I had never been interested in fungi - in fact I actively hated “mushrooms” in food and refused to eat anything tainted by them.
The next day I felt an urge to continue what I had tapped into. Something about these little figures really started to take root in my brain after I began painting them. Suddenly, they came to life with individual personalities, and they vaguely reminded me of the forests from home.
TWITCH CON 2018
My first in-person sales event took place in San Jose California at the 2018 Twitch Con Artist’s Alley! This was a game-changer for me, and it was incredibly rewarding to actually see my customers interact with my work.
My Funguise brooches had their debut at this event, and have become a staple in my shop ever since. However, my current inventory looks a little different because I am always designing new sculptures, and I don’t like to make the same thing twice.
This was also the debut of my first “potted pals” — a standing Funguise figurine variant that I didn’t continue due to some issues with their bases.
I also started my tradition of reserving the color PURPLE for in-person sales ONLY (and customs) in my sculptures. This was inspired by the purple-themed exclusives I made since that is the TWITCH brand color. However, I decided to extend this practice into my work as a general rule because it makes purple Funguise more exclusive and rare. :)
So I also produced an exclusive set of figurines for just for this event, all featuring a deep royal purple in their paint jobs.
Funguise Ornaments (2018)
After receiving a custom request for an ornament version of my figurines, I created a small ten-piece set of ornaments that were never listed in my shop.
These ten original Funguise ornaments were given homes with my closest friends and family that Christmas and most of them display them year round.
These are an item that is requested frequently, and one that I will be exploring again in the future (such as the small collection I created in late 2020!)
