“When I was chosen to paint for Treefort, I thought, oh my gosh, now I have to learn to paint a window!” Eller says. Typically, she works with pen and standard sized paper, so adjusting her artwork to appear in gigantic window form took some learning, and a surprising amount of paint she says. Luckily, she had help from friends (some of whom have actually inspired their own Little Cuties) along the way.
Idaho Makers
Window Dressing BY HEATHER HAMILTON-POST
Tiffany Eller's Little Cuties exist in several forms, but recently, you may have seen them on the windows of Shift Boutique in downtown Boise. They’re big and
small and everything in between, glasseswearing, freckled, and totally rocking out. Of course, they’ve gone the way that window paintings do in extreme weather, but Eller says they’ll be back in September when Treefort returns.
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The Little Cuties, which you can see in more detail at Moonbabyarts. com, have been around since October, when Eller started participating in a daily drawing challenge via Instagram that focused on body positivity. “I started posting body positive Little Cuties every day for the month of October. And I got so many requests to make a coloring book that I thought, ok, cool. I know how to do that,” she says. The book, which was crowdfunded, comes complete with a glossary describing what each character represents. Eller does her best to make sure they’re diverse, noting that the body positivity movement sprung from fat activism and fat liberation. “Then it kind of got co-opted by people like me--white women in straight sized bodies. And so I try to be really cognizant about what I’m sharing and to think not so much how bodies look but how we feel about our bodies,” she explains.
Eller also explores body diversity and body shame in The Body Story Podcast, a weekly podcast in which she invites people to tell their own body stories. “I’ve interviewed a mermaid who identifies herself as a fat mermaid. I’ve interviewed people who have had bariatric surgery, or people that have lost a limb or lost their ability to move their limbs,” she says. “And, as I’ve made Little Cuties, it’s shifted my body story because it forces me to think of things in a new way and to try to think of experiences that I haven’t undergone myself.” Eller’s mom is an artist too, so she grew up making art, but says she struggled to find a medium that she really connected with. She describes how, when she let go of “all the shoulds” about her art, she found a career in graphic design, which led to Little Cuties which led, eventually, to painting a window on a downtown storefront.
