Leslie Polinko is a fantasy sculptor and a mother. She owns a small, female-run shop called Les Polinko Studio. She is a creature maker, so she makes all kinds of different creatures based on things she loves such as fables, stories, lore, popular culture, and fandoms. On occasion, she does fan art of fairy lore and fantasy, but mostly sells her original creatures.
“My degrees are from Purdue University in fine Art, painting and drawing – no sculpture in there. I was self-taught when I came to this work in 2000. I got married, came to Pittsburgh, and my husband got a job at the University of Pittsburgh. I am having my first child, and I want to be home, so I stayed home.”
Leslie started out online selling her one-of-a-kind fairy sculptures, but she’s selling items in person at the Pittsburgh Renaissance Fair since early 2000. She did it part time when she came into Pittsburgh, but eventually had more time to devote to it.
“I would definitely say 2015, 2016. I really took it full time because my daughter was a teenager and really didn’t need me all the time. So I was able to do more,” she said.
In 2019, she started selling at multiple Renaissance fairs and she physically could not go to every single one. She was working by herself but as she scaled up to doing more shows, she needed extra help. She hired her best friend around the time things got serious to get her materials in the right condition to be molded into the creatures. Her jobs included kneading and softening the polymer clay.
“I try to keep up with the demand. I teach myself how to use and make simple models of things to start me with the size of the clay. And it would just be the beginning of something.”
She is the only sculptor so the models helped but she needed something even better as her work was time consuming and expensive. She made her own press molds which made her shop more accessible and affordable. Her friends come in to help by softening clay and coloring the clay. They also lend a hand by helping glue little leaves on things. This reduces the amount of time on each creature because she can’t take too long on one specific creature or the price will go up and she wont be able to create as much.
“I find that I’ll sell $110 items before I’ll sell one $1,000 item. So I just like to make sure that I’m accessible and that all different kinds of people can purchase something from my business wherever I’m at,” she said.
Polinko kept growing her business to where she does multiple renaissance festivals, comic cons, other art shows, fandom shows, and more.
“I really like doing the festivals like the Pittsburgh Renaissance Fair because it’s a happy place. I don’t wait for people to come to me. I go where the people are,” she said.
The demand never stopped which made her want to keep adding more creatures. She loves to create new creatures, but her method still wasn’t the best for durability. A friend in the art industry who works with special effects gave her an idea.
“You need to try casting, which is taking my creatures, and I’ll sculpt an original out of polymer clay, and then I’ll build a mold, an entire mold around it, and then I’ll pour, I’ll cast it in a hard resin that heads up, and then you can get multiple characters out of one mold,” she was advised.
This allowed her to serve more people and do more shows while having more supplies. The clay would crack and things would break because the clay was fragile by itself. She used the method and it made a better product in the end because it was a sturdier.
“The casting will go faster and I don’t have to reproduce it every single time, and for the Renaissance fairs, it works really well to be able to keep my prices down for original art with the casting,” she said.
She has added on more “helpers” as she likes to call them. Leslie now has three people on board with her. They sand pieces, cast pieces, and prep all while she is still on the production line creating her originals.
“I’m 53 now, and my hands are pretty strong, but they get tired now. Working a full week of manufacturing and producing like hundreds, if not a thousand, things a week. Sometimes it’s like, ‘oh, my gosh, my hands really hurt.’ You have to take care of your hands and your eyes. As a maker of things, a creator, you have to take care of yourself.”
Polinko has never had her own online shop until recently as her stock always runs low after shows. She doesn’t have a lot of time to create for shows and online as its busy and challenging to keep up with the demand for both. She has done an Etsy shop when she sold her fairies, but she loves to serve people face to face.
“In 2024, my daughter opened a Patreon for me that she runs, and twice a year she has a sale. Different options are available such as tier one gives you access to an online store that happens a couple times a year, and then there’s a print shop that also happens a couple times a year. So there were sales that happen on Patreon throughout the year, and that’s what’s happening right now,” Polinko said.
As she is not always doing just one show or she has things going on, she has hired a manager to help sell at festivals when she can’t be there. She still creates her pieces and ships them out to him.
Polinko wants to purchase a much larger space to grow her business. She is hoping to add a lot of new products like two dimensional stickers, prints, canvases, bags, and T-shirts. She has also written out kids books. A lot is evolving and developing within her business and she is very thankful for her daughter as she is modernizing everything for her in the upcoming years.
“I love meeting the people and seeing the people as it’s sort of my reward for working so hard, all week long. It’s actually getting out and going to places and seeing all the happy people at the festivals and it’s kind of great,” she said.
She is scaling up and is learning how to manage her new found success. She has degrees in business, so she is networking with other people to find out how they run theirs. She likes to learn from other successful small businesses because she doesn’t need something new, just something that works for her. Many say that the odds are stacked against small business, but she isn’t taking that for an answer.
“Don’t wait for your muse. You have to feed your muse. It’s something that you give to and it grows,” she said.
