Life of an Item with Ocasiocasa

Hello everyone. I’m Dale Ocasio, of ocasiocasa (pronounced
oh-KAH-see-oh KAH-sah). Casa, meaning house or home in spanish, and is
where we do our creating. Jeff, my husband, has been playing with
masking tape art for a while now. He sculpts with it and applies it to
three dimensional objects like glass bottles or, very recently, began
reclaiming dolls with it.

Like Calli, our butterfly art doll. She is one of two art dolls we
have up on Etsy right now.

The idea of using pre-loved dolls as a canvas for masking tape art
came about by bouncing ideas off of each other one morning. We weren’t
really looking for something new to do. It kind of went like this:
“Oh, you know what would be neat? Do what we do to a bottle, but on a
doll instead.” We both smiled, and it stuck.

The masking tape part is all Jeff’s work. It’s the first layer to be
applied. He’ll start with a general idea in his head, but most of the
design happens while he laying the bits of tape to the surface,
sometimes wadding long strips of it, sometimes twisting it, to give it
its shape.
Here are a couple of dolls at the taping stage.

Once the taping is finished, we apply layers of wood glue, sanding
before each new layer, then paint, and last, add a clear protective
coating.
Theses dolls are being glued.


This doll is in the process of being painted.

Calli’s cloth body was hand painted with acrylic paint and her
butterfly wings were made from a photograph of mine, of a real
butterfly. I glued the inkjet photo paper to some chipboard, painted
the backside and applied several coats of glue to the front and back
to stiffen the wings and protect the photo.

Holes were punched out prior making the wings stiff so that I could
sew, by hand, the wings to the back of her cloth body.

We recently showed the dolls, at an art show, for the first time. It
was awesome to see everyone’s reaction to them. This is Patterson,
during his first outing. He had a great time.

And here is a video showing a bit of the taping process on one of our
bottles. I recorded it using an app on my iphone called qik video. I
always meant to add narration, but since that wasn’t happening all on
its own, I just added a bit of music and some text to briefly explain
some details. It was fun, and we hope to do more of these soon.

http://vimeo.com/12956600

I’d like to thank everyone for allowing me to ramble and ‘show and
tell’ and I look forward to reading more about the lives of some of
your items. :-)

cheers,
~dale