This sculpture class is really taking it's toll, but I believe I'm pretty much caught up and in a good place to finish the semester strong! My last portfolio post discussed my Social Issue Additive Sculpture (check out that post
here!), which is now completed!
I'm happy with the way it turned out and even more importantly, I'm happy that it's done!
Our second assignment was to create a manipulative sculpture. So instead of adding pieces or constructing, we are to take a material and manipulate it. I used clay for this piece. In addition to being manipulative, the sculpture also had to be figurative. Most students were doing a bust (head and shoulders) so I did a torso, to try something different. As with most of my pieces recently, I wanted to add an element of fiber arts to my design. To that purpose, one half of the torso will be constructed by weaving.
These two images are the front and back of my torso after the first day of working. I was simply building the piece and roughing in the different body parts. My goal was to continue to build up the piece while paying attention to musculature and bone structure underneath.
After my second day in the studio, I had almost finished the piece in relation to size, but you can see from the butt that I was still working on getting the correct shapes and proportions for all the anatomy.
At this point, I thought I was done! But as my husband pointed out, the butt is very tight and firm and the front look like it belongs to someone who maybe doesn't work out as much. Or as a fellow student put it, 'it looks like it has a Sponge Bob butt' So I went back to work refining the overall shape.
Now I can say that I am all done with the clay portion! I'm waiting for it to dry out and then in the kiln it goes. I believe I will stain it instead of applying a glaze. More to come on that. Now for the weaving part:
As you can see along one side I have made holes. There are dowels that will fit into those holes after firing is complete. These dowels will then become the warp form my weaving portion of the piece that will make up the entire left side of the torso! Hopefully that will be done soon! Now we're onto Subtractive Sculpture (carving), wish me luck!
This one has been on my list for awhile! I've been wanting to make a t-shirt with the phases of the moon on it. In fact I bought the shirt for this project months ago at the thrift store and have just now gotten around to making it. I found this DIY idea on another site, but it was all in Russian! There were some good pictures and since I'm an intelligent human, I was able to figure it out :) Check out the original tutorial here if you can read Russian! To get started, make sure to measure the area of the your shirt that you would like to paint. Then grab a piece of card stock (or in my case I had to create one big enough by taping two pieces together) and decided how much space you want in between each circle. Don't forget to leave some space on the ends too for when you cut the circles out! After you know what amount of space will be taken up by the area between circles, you can use the remaining space and divide by four to get the width of your circles. Now begins the hunt for something circular in your house that is roughly that width! Good luck!
