It's the end of the semester! Hurray we finished in time!
I finished off the periscope by suspending mirrors and writing down important months in exploration for me.
I finished off the periscope by suspending mirrors and writing down important months in exploration for me.
Well then. I kind of forgot about this blog with all the things that have been going on this month. Shame on me! Let me bring you lucky readers up to speed.
I finished up my plaster molded hands but have yet to get the pictures I've taken of them back so I'll put off talking about those till next week. Currently I'm working an an abstracted, autobigoraphical sculpture made of wood.
The theme for my piece was easy to decide on, as I felt exploration has been a big part of my entire life. To represent this concept I thought about a combination periscope/telescope that I had as a kid, and how I might represent that in the size specified (the same length as my body in one direction). I opted to only represent the periscope aspect as a way of joining my childhood and my adulthood... look in one end and see out the other, like looking back at my childhood!
The frame will be rather structural, both to create abstraction as well as to conserve wood. Unfortunately this project must be done on a strict budget as the students themselves must purchase the wood necessary for this project.
As I began prepping the different sections for construction I found that using the large power tools began to get easier and less terrifying... and I didn't sand any fingers off! Hurray!
The whole drilling parts together, the section that should be simple? Don't want to talk about it. Getting everything square so that it looks nice and even? Painful. Realizing that when screwed together your sculpture starts shrinking? Terrifying. I've decided there's much too math involved in this particular project, and it just doesn't please me at all.
Sigh. How am I going to decorate this once it's done?
Once the plaster is set up it will begin to thicken. Once slightly thickened it can then be poured into the mold.
After the plaster has completely hardened, about twenty minutes after being poured, the hand is ready to be released from the mold. This is done by gently tapping butter knives into the seam in order to seperate the two halves and then slowly working the hand out of the other half of the mold.
While waiting for each hand to be created I spent time sanding down the seam lines on the hands and sealing them with a 50% denatured alcohol, 50% shellac solution. Now they're ready for spray paint!
This week I focused on churning out hands from my mold. With each new hand come new problems to solve, from the mold itself changing every time a new hand is cast, to not being able to get the hand out of the mold once made. Let's take a look...
As I stated previously, each time the mold itself is changing. To fix these imperfections I must apply and reapply wet clay to try to mimic the shape of the missing chips. Next I apply Murphy's Oil Soap to help the mold pop apart and the piece to come out of the mold once it's done drying.
After this step is done the two pieces of the mold are brought together as tightly as possible and a piece of rubber strapping is applied to keep the mold in that position. I then put the mold upside down in a bucket so that it will be ready for plaster to be poured in.
Now I'm ready to make my plaster. The wet bucket is coated on the inside with Vaseline to allow for easy cleaning, and filled to the desired point with room temperature water. With as chilly as it's been I've been using warmer water as it cools quickly outside. Then plaster is added in scoopfuls until an island forms and retains shape for at least a minute. Then I get the fantastic privilege of mixing the concoction by hand in the wind!
To be continued...
For our current project we are making molds of an object carved from clay. We will then take the molds and create several copies of the object to create a sculpture comprised of many parts.
My design I decided after sketching out several layout ideas was to create a simplified hand and form a tiny forest of them. The plan is to seal the plaster hands and paint and draw back into them.
After sculpting the hand the next step was to begin forming the mold around the clay using plaster.
First off, the good news... my sculpture didn't explode or otherwise fall apart. Hurray!
Once I was ready to start painting I took the sculpture outside to begin. I started by laying down layers of dark green and brown on the areas that I wanted to be darker than the rest. This layer of paint would dry for 30 minutes before I added more paint.
Next I layered on the lighter green and scratched back into the surface with steel wool after only five minutes of dry time. It didn't take much to bring the paint right back down to the surface of the sculpture. After experimenting with this for a while I instead sprayed darker green layers carefully on top of the green in the most heavily shadowed areas. I also flipped the chayote upside down to paint the bottom the darker green, increasing the variegated green illusion. To achieve the brown stem and bruised area I sprayed paint onto a q-tip and applied it to the appropriate areas.
Once painted some of the flaws of the piece, like the snout area being a little elongated, didn't seem as bothersome. With color the piece takes on the appearance of a unique chayote rather than a direct representation of the original, while retaining important similarities.
While waiting for our clay sculptures to dry and be fired we worked for a day on designing and carving sand blocks for use in metal casting.
For my design I decided to go with a grouping of two bottles with corks. As part of the assignment there needed to be at least three levels within the piece, which I hoped to achieve with the different textures needed to render a bottle like object in this manner.
The following Tuesday we poured molten aluminum into the molds to create our objects.
At first glance it already seems that I didn't get my areas as evenly carved out as I first thought. Once it has cooled and I've had time to examine it more perhaps there will be a solution for making it look more tidy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)