Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Artist Story - Jannie de Lange


 Jannie de Lange lives in a small village in the Netherlands. She has had a passion for dolls since her childhood but since it was impossible to purchase any where she lived, she instead collected pictures and made paper dolls out of them.  Her doll collecting started when she became a mother.  As she bought dolls for her three daughters.

It was when she visited a doll show and saw some hand-sculpted dolls made of polymer clay that she immediately enrolled in a sculpting class and since that time has sculpted her own one-of-a-kind dolls.  She quickly developed her own style, tried all different types of clay and settled on polymer clay.

Jannie has been sculpting since 1994 and her baby dolls since 1999 which are well known world-wide now. She quickly developed her own style, tried all different types of clay and settled on polymer clay, which she mixes from different colors and from her own experience to achieve her realistic skin tone. Polymer clay needs a lot of kneading and it takes a long time and a lot of preparation before it is soft enough to be used. Before the sculpted head can be baked in the oven, she treats the clay in her own special way to imitate the skin texture as realistic as possible.

Her Baby-dolls have become immensely popular worldwide.  The head, arms/hands and legs and “Belly-plate” are sculpted of a polymer-clay the body is made of cotton.  She stuffs and weights them to feel like a real baby.  The babies have glass blown eyes, human hair eyelashes and wear high quality mohair wigs.  The sizes of her babies vary from 18" to 22".

Jannie is a perfectionist and puts great effort in sculpting life-like babies.  Her babies are very realistic and her sculpting is perfectly detailed, from head to toe. The dreamy-melancholic faces of her babies have captured many hearts of admirers around the world.

Inspired by her own three children at a younger age - by children in her neighbourhood and her grandchildren she challenges herself to sculpt her babies in the most natural poses. Jannie loves doing various expressions just keep on enjoying sculpting. Each of her one-of-a-kind babies, are individually sculpted and molds are never used.

In 2009 she sculpted her first Doll Nischi for Paradise Galleries. Nischi was very popular and has been Nominated for the Dolls of Excellence Awards in 2010.

After Nischi, Jannie created more designs for Paradise Galleries, Luke-Cuddlebug-Beautiful baby Kate-Baskets and Bunnies-Nicolas-Sweet Bo Peep. 

 From Nischi came also Future Figure Skater-Nischi’s first Christmas and Happy Birthday Nischi.

Jannie has three daughters and 5 grandsons and 2 granddaughters.
Her hobbies are website-gardening –photography -music -collecting antiques dolls and toys and she loves to ride bicycle with  her husband .

And you can follow her on Facebook and Twitter

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