Let’s dive into the magical world of mushrooms that Brenda West has been creating. Brenda started sculpting from polymer in her early childhood. Since 2018 she has enchanted her audience with little mushrooms for the first time.
“Life has a way of bending and twisting around, so I had about a 15 year hiatus from clay before picking it back up again in 2017 while I was live streaming art on my twitch.tv channel,” says Brenda about her return to polymer.
On the Twitch social media platform, she became connected with tons of artists around the globe and had started making sculptures of her friends' stream mascots. During that process she fell back in love with polymer clay and sculpting in general.
With the first mushroom sculptures that Brenda created she realized how wonderful and charming they look like and started creating a collection. “Three years later I haven't stopped!! I started learning more about mushrooms to understand the beautiful organisms I was referencing for my artwork, and in that process I became fully enamored with mycology - the study of fungi,” explains Brenda of her passion.
After absorbing a ton of information about mushrooms, she finally decided on a name for my creations and began writing a zine series titled "The Fantasy Field Guide to Funguise Friends" which is still under development. Over the time, Brenda has sculpted and hand painted well over 200 figurines! Each Funguise (pronounced Fun Guy) figurine is a one-of-a-kind numbered piece of polymer clay artwork.
“My sculptures are a little bit different from most polymer clay art because I completely paint my pieces with acrylic paint. I use a variety of brands to accomplish this, but my favorite so far has been Golden,” Brenda shares more about her process of creation. As for the clay itself, she creates a custom blend of Super Sculpey Medium and Firm to make her figurines: “The blend I use is a perfect balance between the two, being soft enough to work with my hands but also firm enough to hold the textures that I love to carve into my work. Occasionally I will also work with Cosclay, which cures with more flexibility for delicate details such as snail antennae,” she adds.
We are astonished by the dedication and passion Brenda works with. Recently she also started exploring new sizes with her work and released a few larger pieces in the 8 inch to 12 inch ranges. “These larger pieces are currently exclusive to the local gallery that I work with in Cannon Beach, Oregon.”
Although her polymer clay sculptures are Brenda’s main thing to work on, she is also currently developing a kind of merchandise with her Funguise characters including a line of greeting cards, apparel, stickers,... “Also in the near future, I would like to start sharing more about the wonderful world of Fungi with my audience, because they're incredible organisms that I think are extremely misunderstood by most people,” says Brenda and we can’t wait to see more!
