The bathroom door in Louise Tucker’s house won’t stay propped open.

The rocks she uses for doorstops keep turning into animals and disappearing.

Well, figuratively anyway.

They do turn into animals and disappear but there’s nothing mysterious about it.

Tucker uses paint to bring each rock to life before offering them up for sale at craft fairs.

She often uses oval rocks because they are easily transformed to almost any creature. She enjoys coming across unusually shaped rocks, too. These she studies for a while before picking up her paint brush.

Such was the case when that first rock-as-doorstop turned out to be a hedgehog. Now, every doorstop rock eventually reveals its inner animal.

“I like my rocks to be the animal,” Tucker said.

Among her stone pets, Tucker has frogs and snakes, turtles and ladybugs, foxes and lions, cats, dogs and squirrels. There is even an opossum among her impressive collection of animals.

She said she’s been offered $100 for the critter, but she refuses to part with the stone-faced marsupial.

“My son had brought me this big rock he found in Scarce Grease Creek which flows through his land,” she said. “He said ‘Mother, you might make a fish out of this one.’ But I took one look at it and said ‘No. That’s a possum.’”

Tucker began painting rocks after observing artist and author Lin Wellford do the same while vacationing in Branson, Mo.

“My husband and I went seven straight years to Branson,” Tucker said. “Lin Wellford was at the Bass ProShop in Springfield and I watched her paint and came home and tried it myself.”

After her husband, Billy, passed away in May 2005, Tucker — who operated a beauty shop on Mooresville Road in the Wooley Springs community for three decades — turned her rock hobby into a business endeavor.

She uses her profits to fund her true passion of canvas painting.

“I painted years and years ago,” she said. “But then I had the beauty shop and was raising a family and painting took a back seat.”

Now she’s back in her artist’s smock, creating striking scenery with a rustic tone and taking a painting class with June Daphney Jones one morning each week.

She sells her rock animals as well as her paintings at area craft fairs. The next show on her calender is Athens Bible School’s Homespun, scheduled for May 4 and 5 this year.

She also paints on commission — both animals and paintings — and can be contacted at 232-5431.