Since the first Willow Tree figurine was created back in 1999 their popularity has been climbing to greater and greater heights to the point where they are now available to collectors in countries all over the world.
The creator of these figurines, artist Susan Lordi, became inspired when she observed that in Amish communities, in accordance with their religious beliefs, dolls were fashioned without facial features for the children.
Some argue that reading a book is a much more powerful experience than watching a film as you have to use your imagination to bring the words to life, this can make the experience much more personal than seeing someone elses interpretation. The same idea can be transferred to the dolls Susan observed in the Amish communities. With less information given to you by the dolls with their lack of facial expressions, more can be imagined and made more personal which is what Susan utilized with Willow Tree figurines. She has made special effort to make sculptures that will cause people to feel powerful, positive emotions such as happiness, love, joy and many other strong feelings.
Susan accomplishes in creating these feelings by hand-crafting the figurines, with very simple elegance, into positions that epitomize those emotions. Once she has sculpted a unique piece with specialized sculpting clay and is happy with how it portrays an emotion, it is sent to China. In China, each unique sculpture is cast in resin which is a process which makes it possible for the figurine to be reproduced as many times as they want, after which the piece is hand-painted with Susan overlooking how and what colors are used.
The next step is then to send the reproduced figurines from China to the rest of the world where there are retailers ready to sell them to the growing population of collectors. This procedure used for duplicating each sculpture is so low-cost that it means many figurines are able to be created and sold so there is now a huge collection of figurines available on the market and they are cheap enough that anyone can afford to begin collecting them.
Another positive of there being such a huge range of sculptures (with more coming out annually) is that there is a greater chance that you will be able to find one that will create that emotional reaction in you or someone you love that is so personal that will help you remember or reminisce those times or people you love so much. Because of the incredibly low-cost of production as well, there are bound to be a lot more beautiful designs created to cause these reactions in us and so you’ve always got something to be excited about when the next round of designs is released!