Sculpture: Man

(November 2000)
Although this blog is intended to be about my life in general, I've had requests to post pictures of my sculptures. So things are going to be a little sculpture heavy for the at first.

This sculpture is my second one. You can pretty quickly tell I got further with it then I did on my first one. You can also tell I stuck to the rule of working the core before working the appendages and fiddley bits. I hope you can tell that this was a male model even though he lacks some fiddley bits.

This holding off on the fiddley bits, as it were, would come back to haunt me in a later piece.

I don't remember much about this pose, but it was the second standing pose in a row. Seeing as I was new to the class I assumed all we did was standing posses. As time has passed I've come to realize that it's rare to get a standing pose. Models generally don't like to do them, and the armatures are time consuming and difficult to maintain. For these reasons the day school art program gets priority use of them.

Personally I think it helped a lot to get to do standing posses as my first two poses. It's the only kind of pose were you get to see all around the body. It really helped me learn the forms of the body.

A fun story from this class, which is mixed gender, about half and half, was the women's reaction to the model. The previous model was female, and almost all the women in the class complained the male model was harder to sculpt. I felt this too, but didn't want to express it at the time because certain assumptions about my reasons for stating that would likely be made.

But in my opinion it's very true. The male form is much more difficult. The lines are a lot harsher. Forms don't flow as smoothy. The male body has a much courser appearance. I'm glad the women in the class agreed with me. Also, I have to say, for a variety of reasons, I don't find the male form very interesting.

This is another model were I took the pictures, then scraped the clay off the armature and placed it back in the bins. I think there are at least two more to go before I actually made a permanent one.