A Peak Inside my Portfolio: Figurative Sculpture *UPDATE*

Sculpture Class is over! Last night was our final critique. It went fine and I can officially say I'm done. One more class and a thesis until I get that Master's Degree! Now if you remember from my last post, my figurative sculpture suffered some damage in the kiln. I did decide to use Kintsugi to repair it and I love it!  But before that, here's the final image of my subtractive sculpture:

Turned out just great! Now moving on to the 'happy accident' piece... After some serious epoxy use, both to repair my piece (as best as I could) and secure the posts for weaving, here's what my piece looked like:

The I used acrylic paint and water to create a stain for the piece. I used brown, black, red and brilliant yellow straight out of the tube, watered down, and layered over the clay. Then I covered the entire piece in a wash of black, watered-down acrylic. The places where there were missing pieces, you can see I left un-painted. That's where the Kintsugi comes in.

If you click on Kintsugi, you will head on over to a webpage with some wonderful info about the art form. However, briefly, it is a way of taking broken pieces of pottery and putting them back together to create a new and possibly more beautiful piece. I just used some gold leaf and gold paint, nothing like the actual gold resin used by professionals. Regardless, I still think it turned out pretty nicely. The weaving looks great as well!

A Peak Inside my Portfolio: Figurative Sculpture

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!

Paper Weaving with Young Students

Each year, students do some sort of fiber arts project. With the older students, I do patterns inside of tabby weaving and make pouches, we also do simple sewing. However, those projects don't go very smoothly in less the students already have a foundation in weaving skills and techniques. We start in kindergarten and first grade with paper weaving. It's a cheap option and doesn't take as long as the yarn weaving. It also helps the students that still need to develop fine motor skills because they're using large strips of paper.

For first grade this year, we are combining weaving and collage-making to create a house! I originally saw this idea on one of my favorite blogs, Painted Paper! However, she originally found the idea on Pinterest.

We started by measuring and cutting our looms. I had the students use the ruler to make their lines. We did simple measuring using the width of the ruler as our guide. Then we cut the lines, making sure not to go too far! This took one class period. We went slowly and made sure everyone got it right. During the second class, we wove strips of paper into our loom and glued down the edges. This also took a whole class period because students have only done this once before in kindergarten. However, I have done this with first graders who did not do paper weaving in kindergarten and I have to tell you, it goes much faster if they have already tried it once!

During the third and fourth classes, we talked about collages and how to make them. We also looked at some examples. Then students glued their weaving to a piece of blue paper and begin collaging their house using scrap paper. I left it up to them as to what details their house would have. Let me tell you, some of those bad boys had pools and diving boards and the works! After this, the students were given paint choices as well as paint brushes and sponges. They added texture and details that they could not create with paper. The finished results are colorful and interesting and totally unique!