UPDATED: You drive us wild, we'll drive you crazy....

UPDATE: Thanks to a winter storm, I was off school, so today -- nearly eight months after starting this project -- I got out my paints and finished the rest of the band. I think the little guys turned out pretty cute:

I especially like the contrast between their cutesy-innocent accessories (dragonfly, sunflower, snail, mushrooms, etc.) and their rock-and-roll-all-night makeup. I couldn't resist making Peter's mushrooms look a little psychedelic....

Through a bizarre stream-of-consciousness intersection of pop culture icons, I came up with the most gloriously ludicrous idea I have ever had, and I was powerless to resist the urge to make it reality.

I'd been looking for lawn gnomes for several months, having had an inexplicable compulsion to paint a few to scatter around my garden. With that in mind, on the way back from visiting family in Illinois last month, I insisted that my husband stop at Sullivan Pottery on Route 66 in Missouri.

I hit the mother lode. I wound up buying five gnomes in two different sizes, all at bargain-basement prices (I think the cheapest was $5, and the most expensive was $10).

Surveying my little platoon of smiling concrete sprites, I found myself thinking, "That's like the lawn gnome version of the Something-Or-Other Army." The term I was trying to come up with was "Terra Cotta Army," but what kept popping into my head instead was "KISS Army."

You can guess what happened next:

I'm still working on his bandmates, but I couldn't resist posting the Paul Stanley Tribute Gnome. I don't really know why I started with Paul Stanley. I think I just like his makeup.

I thought about painting KISS-style clothing on the gnomes, but their little jackets and stuff are pretty well-defined, which makes it hard to get too cute with the paint job without it being really obvious. As I thought about it, I decided that the only thing more ridiculous than a KISS Army lawn gnome was a KISS Army lawn gnome who looked like a perfectly normal, garden-variety gnome in every aspect except his makeup and membership patch.

I'd originally chosen to ignore the imperfection in the concrete on his foot, but the more I thought about all the times I've stepped in poop while turning compost, the more I decided it made perfect sense for a garden gnome to have something on his shoe.

His pants are shiny and black because his little concrete butt was so carefully rendered that I decided he really deserved a pair of arseless chaps just to show it off, but once I started painting them, they didn't look quite right, so I just turned them into leather pants instead. (Actually, I'm not sure the goal was for them to look quite right. I think I would worry about myself -- a LOT -- if I saw a lawn gnome wearing arseless chaps and thought, "Yeah ... that looks about right." But they didn't look wrong in quite the right way, either.)

I'll update this post as I finish the other gnomes.