Sculpture Class....

Back at my sculpture class, it was all going well for my 'wave' piece.  It's a metal armiture in a herculite base, with chicken wire covered in plaster bandage and herculite making up the wave form.

When it dried, I was pretty pleased with the general shape.

However, once I started painting and staining it, it all went a bit wrong.

There's various colours of ink, wax and some aluminium leaf in there. 

 

It's meant to look reminiscent of a piece of seaweed, and the shape's really pleasing.  But it didn't turn out how I expected at all.  It looked awful.  So I kept on working in it, rubbing it back and waxing.

 

The problems came with the inside facet of the scupture.  What to do with that?  It was all looking as if this was some sort of piece of army-issue camouflage art.  Yuk.

Then my tutor suggested using the towel that I was leaning on to line the inside.  Suddenly, it all came together...

Aha....

So next week, making a towel out of latex...

Sculpture completed...

Thought you might like to have a look at the sculpture that I finished at Art School last night.

You might remember that this involved casting myself in plaster using a large sheet of hessian and a lot of clingfilm (not pleasant), and that it originally liked like the Grim Reaper, which wasn't my intention at all.  This is how it began...

However, with the addition of a proper armature, inner plaster core section, and following a lot of work refining the surface and some finishing touches, here it is.

Not the most scenic of surroundings - it is a casting workshop - but you get the idea.  

The piece has flowers and butterflies bursting out from inside the inner folds of the garment.

The butterflies are on wires, so that they move.

I then had a battle on my hands to wrap the thing up and get it back to the studio - at 6 foot tall, and heavier than a small planet, it wasn't the easiest item I've ever had to transport.  However, with the help of my tutor, the rest of the class, and some sheer brute force, I managed to wrestle it into submission!

Sculpture!

I thought you might like to have a quick look at some of the work I'm doing in my sculpture class.  This is the stuff I do for fun!

I do evenings at Glasgow School of Art, and this is the piece that I'm working on at the moment.

 

It's constructed from hessian material covered in the world's supply of plaster, and placed over a metal and wooden armature to support it.

It's an old trick I picked up from Rodin, who used a real dressing gown dipped in plaster as a study for his finished bronze sculpture of Balzac...

However, with all our struggles so far in the studio with giant sheets of monumentally heavy plaster-coated hessian slopping all over the place, I think I'm on a pretty steep learning curve....