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Early small squat frog with legs. This is a recent innovation. (For more, check out Musical Froglets.)

So there is this thing my dad would do with the squat frog design. He would simplify it to the point where it did not have any back legs. No back legs. Very minimal. And it worked, although some folks did not like it. Others do. They like it a lot and are willing to put their money where their mouth is. They pay good money for such a frog sculpture.

But as I was working on these squat frogs in early January, I found myself changes things up. What if, God forbid, I put hind legs on these creatures? I started doing that. A fellow that sells my work told me they looked WAY better that way. So, I continued, and that is the way I make them now. And I will have pictures up of the latest thumb-sized squats. As I made the squatting frogs smaller and smaller, I finally got to a design and over-all look and style that was really, really great. It looked like a comic book character. It looked really finished.

Here is another early squat frog with legs. Look at all my squat frogs, you will find them all to be different. The eyes, the gullet, the position of the hand, the feet – everything gets changed up. I don’t change everything for every sculpture. But something gets changed. None of them are alike. I tried that, recently, actually. It didn’t work to try to make them all the same and do an assembly line type of thing. Actually it was not at all an assembly line because it was just me working on them. But you get the idea.

This was my try at a self imposed assembly line type of frog where I tried to make as many frogs as I could the same way. It did not work. I learned a few things, though. They look kind of like grandma or grandpa without dentures.

Here is a batch of them:

They did not turn out that well. And I worked hard at this. Even so, they have a certain charm, a certain… je ne sais quoi. Perhaps.

I am reminded not to put all my eggs in one basket. I made these around Easter, and the body looks like an egg. I formed each body around an egg shape I built out of steel. It was quite a production. All for naught… And yet, it is true, with the frogs, that the homely ones – I won’t be so cruel as to call them ugly; after all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder – they have their charm as well. Character.

Compare those frogs to this:

Ok, this one is what I finally got to when I took my time and made one single small squat frog just how I wanted it after I made all the other ones. I was going for the control and quality of a comic or 3D animation. I got that with this frog. It is the first of its kind. It is a terrific frog. No one else can make a frog like this.

Before I made that frog, I made this one:

You may notice that this one is not as, uh, finished as the other one. He looks kind of bewildered. I was just trying to get certain aspects down, the general idea, before I made the polished one after that. The polished one I call thumb sized squat frog 1. So this one, the one that looks bewildered, is thumb sized squat frog 0. He’s actually a great frog, as well. Just not as finished. More like a sketch.