(Linda Ehrenfried - Charm City Originals) 
Her Style Is Everything
by Pam North
It’s not easy to pinpoint a style in Linda Ehrenfried’s work. The variety of her creations run the gamut,   bouncing from caricature to realistic; light and sprightly to dark and slightly menacing; human to animal. Each seems to be a departure from the other, and often isn’t easily attributable to anything familiar or identifiable as her work. It’s almost as if Linda reinvents herself with each new character that forms from her imagination. 
A Maryland native, Linda began her artistic path in high school as a painter and sketch artist  She studied human anatomy, scale, and proportion for portraiture, which was her main interest. In college she was able to take two classes with renowned sculptor, Ralph Baney, who taught stone and clay sculpting.
After college, Linda opened a business, and all but gave up being an artist. Fifteen years passed before she had the chance to get back into art work, after a health crisis forced her to give up her business. The habit of working seven days a week, paired with boredom, soon drove her to the craft store, where she purchased paint, canvas, an easel, brushes, and two boxes of Super Sculpey flesh-colored clay. Upon her return home, she immediately began sculpting, creating three faces, which, when paired with armatured bodies, turned into dolls depicting a fairy, a mermaid, and a child. “I was hooked,” she said. “The funny thing is that the paint, canvas, and easel I bought then still sit in the corner untouched all these years later. I have been sculpting every since.” Her illness and the polyform clay had been the game-changers.
Her one-of-a-kind dolls are a hybrid of ball-jointing and wire armature, and she is experimenting with BJDs. Costuming is one of her favorite elements in creating a doll, and she accepts commissions, enjoying putting her own spin on what the client is requesting.
Her business background, which had encompassed retail gifts, collectibles, and dolls, had left her with  helpful knowledge and experience. What she didn’t know already, she would learn for herself. “I am a learning addict, so I always have searched books and the Internet for new information related to the subjects in which I am most interested,” she explained. “Also, over the years I have been blessed to learn from Mark Dennis, Jody Creagar, Wendy Froud, Jack Johnston, Cherie Fretto, and many others who generously have shared their talents, either online, or via books or DVDs. Self-study via online learning is the wave of the future, and more specialized teaching methods are popping up online constantly. Now that I have nearly 10 years of practice under my belt, I want to pay it forward to help others learn. Classes are not always practical and are very expensive overall, as the doll artists live all over the globe, with travel involved to take classes, but online they are just a click away.”
Linda has established a presence on the Internet, under her own name and also as Charm City Originals. She already has recorded a series of doll making tutorials on YouTube. “Some have had as many as 30,000 views already,” she reported. “Teaching is something that is very important to the future of the doll industry. Hand-sculpting takes a lot of time, practice, and determination to learn, and talent gets one only so far. One must practice and learn everything possible about the art form, but for doll makers, anatomy, scale, and proportion are pivotal. Trying to learn these on one’s own can be intimidating, so the more artists who share their expertise by adding informative content to the web the better.”
Linda is a Vice-President of the Professional Doll Makers Art Guild (PDMAG); the Manager of the PDMAG Academy, with several apprentices of her own; and the webmaster for PDMAG. The Academy currently has 33 mentors, master artists who volunteer their time and talents to teach their apprentices. “I spend no less then 40 hours a week working on Guild-related tasks. I love the work I do; it has been the highlight of my doll making career. Our members are the best and brightest artists I have ever met, and the friendliest people you could ever want to know. There are many great groups out there, and they all have their niches in the industry, but none has ever made me feel as welcome and included as PDMAG.”
Inspiration is not a problem for her, as it seems to surround her. “It’s everything, really. I see faces everywhere I go. Things that others see as random shapes, my brain sees as underdeveloped characters, With a little help from my vivid imagination, the dust on the back window of a car may yield several sketchable characters. Creating dolls for me is like expressing a three-dimensional dream. Many of my characters come from images I imagined in a daydream. I may be walking along and see a whimsical character looking back at me in the pattern on a stone tile, or in a cloud, or in the folds of clay as I condition my scrap clay back into a ball. I sculpted the cutest frog character named Fribbit when his face appeared in the folds of the clay, and I remember looking at it and saying, ‘Well, hello there, little face, who are you?’ It did not take much tweaking to see he was telling me he wanted to be a frog,” she explained laughingly. 
Linda readily admitted to being a bit of a hoarder regarding art supplies. “I tend to collect everything. I believe this is compounded by the fact that I am a stereotypical introvert, and prefer to stay in my home and studio to work on dolls rather than going out. Other than to the craft store, that is; I love the craft store! I have enough supplies to never need to buy more, yet my favorite trip out is to go to the craft store!”

Contact Information:
Website: www.charmcityoriginals.com/
Email: scvgallery@aol.com
Phone: (410) 282-6475, cell (443) 955-0206