Sculpture: Pigon

(May 2006)
This is sculpture is another small one like the Dancer. Like the Dancer I was board of modeling from life and decided to so something from my head. This one was original going to be more doll like, like the Dancer, but as I worked on it I added more and more detail. So it's kind of half way between the doll look and a realistically model.

I also wanted to add cloths to this one, but I ran out of modeling time. Cloths were going to take at least one more class then I had time. I like it as it is, but I wanted to make her look like she was part of a yoga class.

The pose is known as pigeon. This is a tricky pose that I've never seen anyone do live. Although I suspect a few people I've seen in class would be capable of it. My rendition has a few problems with it. When a real person does the pose there is more bending from the lower back, the head is almost upside down and looking backwards and the back thigh is closer if not flat on the ground. There is just a little too much backwards bend in the back leg.

When I stared it I hadn't seen the pose in a while so I was going completely from memory. I was also going for a particular look, and having here looking straight up was an important to the look I was going for.

The top pictures are of the sculpture in its clay form. This is the state it gets to just before beginning the molding process. The design is complete but the structure of the mold has not been completed.

The middle set of the photos is of the sculpture with the mold walls added. In most cases clay is used to build the walls between the different sections of the mold. In this case the sculpture was so small it was difficult to build the clay walls. The teacher suggested I try copper shims. The shims are cut from a very thin sheet of copper.

This particular mold is three pieces. This was done because there are three separate loops of open space in the model. If I didn't make the mold three pieces it would have been very difficult if not impossible to remove the clay and prep the mold for casting. However each piece you add to the mold increases the complexity of building and casting the mold. My rule of thumb is it takes one class for every section of mold you need just to build the mold. From there the prep time for casting the mold is about the same regardless of the number of pieces.

The copper was interesting to work with compared to the clay. The sections of copper closing in the inner loops I actually left in and were enclosed by the mold. This made for some flashing that I needed to break off and clean up, but otherwise worked great.

I treated the outside pieces the same as I would treat a clay wall when mold making. Once one side was built up in plaster I removed the copper and prepared a slip wall so I could apply plaster to the next section and pieces would still separate. I learned later that when using copper shims you are supposed to just leave them all in place. However I think it worked much better doing it the way I did it.

The final set of pictures is of the mold itself. The first one shows the size of th mold when it's all together. The second photo is the inside of the three pieces, and final it's the inverted mold filled with Densite. I cast this particular mold up at a cottage I was renting with friends from work. Casting is one of the few things I can do outside of class, however I have to do it somewhere I can get messy.

Once the Densite has cured in the mold the mold is chiseled off. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the final piece yet. That will have to wait for another post.

Sculpture: Guay Head

(November 2006)
My previous post about Guay was a lead in to this one. Ever since I met Guay I've always wanted to sculpt her head.

When she first came to the class to model she had this wonderful chaotic hair style. The only thing I can think of close to it is Andy Warhol's hair. Short and sticking out all over. It looked awesome. But I was casting at the other end of the class, so I could only think about how cool it would be to sculpt her.

Then the next time she was in she was completely bald. Which was great because it was the first time I could actually see the structure of the scull on a models head. My previous two head sculptures do have some problems with proportion on the back of the head.

Unfortunately the second time she was in I was also working on casting.

Finally this year I get my chance. She had a small tuft of hair above her forehead so she's effectively bald. Ideal for me, but she was the first model of the term, and the teacher likes to do several quick, half class poses for the first two classes, then one full class pose. Three classes being the longest we get with a single model. Not ideal.

I wanted to do this piece so badly though. I haven't work so hard and so fast on something like this in a long time. It was great. I had one three hour class to get as much done as I possibly could. And I was absolutely amazed at how far I got.

The pictures here are of the piece just before I started casting. I did three weeks of clean up work in class, and I actually brought this one home and worked on it for another 5 hours.

But what I got done in the one class was enough to base all the rest of the work on. Which was great. It showed that I'm getting to a point where I can worked quickly from the model and get enough down to be able to finish it from memory.

But, but you say, the sculpture has hair, and you said she was bald. Yes well, I like to do hair. One of the funnest things is coming up with a hair style.

Although I like this hair very much, it wasn't my first choice. I had a style in mind that was reminiscent of the hair style Guay had the first time I saw her. Unfortunately it was going to be too time consuming to produce. This year I am only able to make the fall session of classes. This means I must get to at least the completed mold stage, or the piece is lost.

Last week I started molding. There are two weeks left. It shouldn't be a problem getting the mold done now. There is some question as to whether I can get the clay out. But that's not a serious problem. It just means it will be very heavy to take home, and I'm going to have quite a mess in my bath.

When will I get it cast? Probably fall 2007. When will it be finished? Probably spring 2008.

Sculpture: Guay Seated

(October 2006)
All the models that have posed on the Sculpture class I take are awesome. It's hard work holding the same position for 3 hours and then return a week later and take the exact same pose for another 3 hours.

If all the models are the best, Guay is the best of the best. She is also in high demand so we rarely get here. In fact this is the first time I actually go to sculpt from her. The previous few times she was in I was stuck down at the other end making a mold.

Not only is she curved to fit a beautiful sculpture æsthetic she takes poses that are hard to hold. Usually involving twisting or arching the torso.

In the first two classes of a session we tend to do quick sketches rather then multi week posses. This is a sculpture that I did of Guay in an hour and a half. I'm very please with how much I managed to get done in that short amount of time.

Sculpture: Torso, Part 2

(September 2005)
So after a clay sculpture is completed it must have a mold cast from it in order to make it in some way permanent. Unlike the Tile where it was made from a firing clay, most of the sculpture work I do is done in clay that is much like what you dig out of the ground. In the sculpture case it comes from a special mine in Kentucky, I think. But that just because it's a consistent quality.

Making the mold, then casting it is a involved process, and not a very artistic process. I'm going to try not to get into too much detail. In the end it's not all that exciting.

In this case the sculpture allowed for a one piece mold. This is the simplest case, and as the name suggest the mold only has one piece. The more complicated the shape, the more pieces you need for the mold.

The mold is made from simple plaster. It is layered on for strength, and finally a layer of burlap is applied to hold it all together. Once the mold is completed the final material is poured inside the mold and allowed to harden. In this case the mold is a waste mold, because the mold is destroyed in order to remove the sculpture from it.

In the picture above the piece has already been cast. Because this mold is so big it would be impossibly heavy to cast it solid. So instead I cast it as a shell. This sculpture is case in Densite, which is a plaster like material but it cures harder. To cast the shell I poured some Densite into the mold, then tipped the mold and allowed the densite to cover all the surfaces. I did this repeatedly until the entire inner surface of the mold was covered to a thickness between .5 and 1 cm thick. Over that I placed a layer of Fiberglas soaked in Densite, and for good measure I added a grid work of wire to hold everything together.

Getting the piece out of the mold is a matter of breaking the mold off the piece. This is done with a wooden hammer and chisel. In this case I was at the cottage and didn't have a wooden hammer, so instead I used a log. The wooden hammer is desirable over metal or rubber because of its rebound properties. It gives a much better feel for what is happening at the chisel blade. Metal hammers give to sharp a strike and rubber is too bouncy.

This mold came off quite easily. Because the sculpture was so smooth in many places large chunks of the mold just fall away after being struck.

This is also a very satisfying part of the process because you get to see the sculpture again for the first time in a long time. In this case about 6 months.

Finishing this piece involves sanding off the mold sheen and other imperfections. I didn't get to that till this summer.

Sculpture: Torso

(March 2005)
This is the big project. Over the years of taking this coarse there have been several people who have consistently been there. One of them, Gill, always works big. Very big. To heavy to lift big. For a sense of scale his sculptures are topically life size in proportion. By comparison I topically work in a range of 1 to 1.5 feet in length for a full body. This means Gill rarely does the full pose. He usually concentrates on the torso.

I've always admired his work, and decided early in the year I wanted to try doing a pose really big. In the Winter session an opportunity presented itself with a perfect reclining pose. So I grabbed the biggest board I could, a large chunk of Styrofoam to help keep the weight down, a pile of clay, and lots of encouragement from the teacher and tech, and went big.

This sculpture is big, like Gills work. Unlike Gill I tend to be more realistic where he tends to abstract his works. The sculpture is about 80-90 percent life size to the model.

These pictures of the piece are after 3 classes with the model and 1 class of cleaning up. If you look at them in detail you will see the clay is covered in tool marks. This is from me working the surfaces to get the forms just right.

Ultimately I wanted the surfaces to be very smooth. The process of doing this takes a lot of time. It involves working the surface with a fine toothed saw blade and a sponge. Gradually working out all the tool marks and smoothing out the surface. This took another 2 or 3 classes.

These pictures are of the sculpture at the start of the last class I worked on the sculpture. It is fresh out the garbage bags we use to keep the clay from drying out between classes. The next week I started casting it. Almost all of that last class I spent working on the nipples. If you look closely here the nipples are surrounded by a swirl of tool marks. While this look often works, it doesn't work with when the rest of the sculpture is so realistic.

So that class I spent consulting with the teacher and the model that was posing in a different pose at that point, trying to figure out how to make the nipples look more realistic. I settled on a process of adding tiny bumps around the nipple and blending them in. This was a long and slow process but it yielded much better results then what is pictured above.

The other major difference is the rib cage and the clavicle bones have been toned down. The day school teacher dropped in one day, and I know him well from when he used to teach night school, and made a couple of simple comments. He is like that. You don't get praise from him. You do get excellent pointed criticism. Which is exactly the kind of thing you need when learning. He simply pointed out how harsh the lines of the ribs and clavicle were compared to the softness of the rest of the piece. He then left it to me to do what, if anything, I wanted to address it. This is the kind of thing you need when working on something of this nature. You're so close to it it's hard to see it as a whole. Once he mentioned it, I could see exactly what he was saying. So I took steps to soften these lines, and I think it helped a lot.

The next step in this piece is casting it. Unusually I have pictures of some of that process. However I will wait for another post to continue the description.

Sculpture: High Fired

(March 2006)
Back to a sculpture from this year. I've posted this one earlier in it's clay form and bisque fired form. Now here it is after it's been high fired.

High firing is as the name suggest done at a much higher temperature. A special kiln is used for high firing. One of the things that happens in high firing is metals within the kiln will vaporize and condense on the pieces. Particularly iron oxides. This gives the pieces a warm glow after the firing. The clay also takes on more of a stone look then the very white crisp look after bisque firing. In this case I washed the piece in an oxide called rutile. This enhanced the natural oxide effect of high firing.

One other thing that occurred during high firing is two cracks formed. This was no surprising, I could see them forming in the bisque fired stage. They also correspond to places where I tried to join to blobs of clay after the clay had dried a little to much to be worked.

The cracks aren't serious, and don't pose a risk of propagating across the piece. They will make it a little weaker if dropped, but I'm not planning to do that intensionally.

Here are the four stages, clay, bisque fired, rutile applied and high fired.

Sculpture: Dancer

s(December 2004)
It's been a while since I posted a sculpture.

This sculpture was started because I was board of sculpting guys. Through a unfortunate sequence of timing whenever I was in a position to sculpt from the model, the model was a guy, and I was getting tired of it. So I thought I'd try something different.

Around the sculpture studio there are a lot of pieces done by the day students. A lot of them are very good. And they get to do things that we don't get to do in the evening class. One of those things is carving. And I thought I'd like to give it a try.

To make things easier, then say carving stone, they make a box out of a special mix of materials. This makes for something that is easy to carve, but has the appearance of stone when finished. To make the blocks, they use a 2 liter juice container as a mold, mix together plaster, Densite and vermiculite. Vermiculite is a very soft stone material. The form they use for making the carving block is a lot like very small packing peanuts. It's also very light. The Densite and plaster are used to hold it all together. Densite is very similar to plaster it just cures harder. By mixing the three, about 2-1-1, you get about the right hardness for carving.

So after making two of these blocks, I needed something to carve. While it could be the model, the teacher didn't want to make a big deal out of me doing something different, so he suggested I make a maquette, to work from. Since I was doing Salsa dancing at that time, I decided to do a little dancer in the final position of a spin. I also decided to do a Japanese super deformed kind of look. Big head small body, simple forms.

The maquette above is quite small. The lead bars are to hold t up because it wasn't very stable, and it wasn't very well built. I think I slapped it together in less then an hour.

The next step was to start carving the block. This was a very interesting process. Very hard to get started. It's a tricky feeling, you know if you go too far you can't go back. But if you don't cut into the box, you'll never get anything out of it.

The block was interesting to cut. I use an old steak knife for most of my sculpting. It's a simple tool that works very well for me. This knife cut nicely into the box, so at at least that part of it was comfortable.

It's also tricky visualizing where things are within the box so you know where to cut. One of the suggestions the teacher had was draw each side of the sculpture on the sides of the box. Work your way around the block gradually cutting this pattern deeper and deeper. Another method is to cut to the deepest points, then work your way back out from those points. A combination of the two is probably the best.

Unfortunately something shiny must have crossed my path, because I never finished the carving. I do still have it, and I might finish it one day.

However I did go back to the maquette. Seeing as I didn't finish the carving I decided to cast the maquette so I'd at least have a reference if I went back to the casting.

So I spent a class cleaning up the maquette, and a few classes making the mold. I then prepared and cast it in Densite. This took me to the spring of 2005. The class work on this peice spanned the gaps in working on another piece.

Over the summer I worked on sanding it. I spent a week at a cottage with a bunch of friends from work. I spent a good amount of my time there working on this sculpture and another one. Finally when classes started up again in the fall I took the sculpture back to class and added colour to it. So from start to finish it took about a year to complete.

I am very happy with this piece. But it has a lot of mix emotions for me. It was originally intended to be a gift for someone that is no longer part of my life. When I said above that I stopped the carving because something shiny crossed my path, that wasn't the truth. I will always cherish this peace as a reminder of the good times we had together. I may never finish the carving. It's unfinished form is rather symbolic too.

Sculpture: Tile, Bisque Fired

(March 2006)
Today was the start of the Spring Session of the sculpture class and I got the Tile Sculpture back. Much to my relief it did not explode the kiln. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.

It's gone though the first stage of firing, called bisque firing. The next stage is called high firing. I'm assuming it called high firing because they take it to a higher temperature.

One thing you can do when high firing is add oxides to change the colour of the piece. A straight high firing will make this particular clay come out a gray stone colour. It also tends to pick up a reddish, orangish, brown tone from iron oxides in the clay and from surrounding pieces. However this effect tends to only happen to the most open areas of the sculpture.

So to even out this effect I added an oxide called rutile. Don't know exactly what it is, but it will give the piece a light reddish, orangish, brown tone. Or at least that's the plan. You never know what's really going to happen in a kiln.

The pictures show the raw bisque fired piece, in white, and with the rutile applied. The final picture is of the piece in the kiln. This is the smaller high fire kiln. It's big enough to sit in when it's empty. The bisque fire kiln is in the same room. That one is large enough you can walk into it.

Sculpture: Tile

(March 2006)
I thought I'd post a new one for a change. This sculpture is different from the rest in that it was sculpted in a firing clay. This means to get the final piece it just needs to be kiln fired, instead of the long involved casting process with the other pieces I've done.

I sculpting it during the last class of the Winter session. It went off the drying room where it will be taken to the kiln for firing. So I eagerly await the start of the Spring session so I can see how it turns out.

There is a multi-step firing process involved. The first firing I believe is called a bisk firing. After this firing the piece will come back very white in colour. It can be left in this state, or it can be high fired. High firing will give the piece a more stone like look. More earthy yellow in tone. It will also pick up deposits of iron which cast an interesting shadow over the piece. The iron comes from the kiln it's self. The temperature is high enough that small amounts of it vapourise and then condense in on the piece.

Another thing you can do before the high firing is add surface finishes. I'm not sure what all the options are, but I've seen some of thenm, and you can get some interesting effects.

So an obvious question is, why don't we use a firing clay all the time? Well there are several reasons I can think of. The clay is a lot more expensive to work with and it more difficult to work with. It costs more to get, and it's harder to maintain. It must be kept clean of contaminants or it could explode during firing. It's also harder to work with. The grain of the clay is much larger, so it's harder to get detail into it. It dries faster, and doesn't soften up again easily. Finally you need to be very careful how put it together. Creating an air pocket in the clay could cause the piece to explode when fired.

Plus there's the poetry class, which makes full use of the kiln so there's rarely an opportunity for additional works to get fired. So it was a bit of a privilege to get to work with this clay and I fully enjoyed it.

The moment of truth will come in the next few weeks. Did I make any mistakes creating it that might cause it to come apart or even explode in the kiln. I worked with it a lot longer then I should have and it was getting pretty dry by the end. It's hard to add new clay when the old clay is almost dry. So it could turn out that these pictures are all I have of 6 classes worth of work.

Unlike all my other pieces that I've just decided to squish back into the bin rather then cast, the decision is not mine whether it survives. It could return to class this week and be given a hand full of rubble.

Sculpture: Roboman

(May 2004)
This is about the mid point of the all male model trend. I believe I had just completed work on casting Man 2. This was the last three week pose of the school year. As I recall I didn't have much creative energy left. Sometime this leads to trying different things. This is a good example of that happening.

Because the school year was coming to an end there was no way to preserve this piece. Well not easily at anyway. So knowing it's just going to get squished gives you a little more freedom to just play with it. It also gives you little incentive to put effort into it. So the combination of those two factors resulted in this part robot man.

Had I had more time or interest in it I probably would have taken it to the half and half stage. I think it's an interesting idea. I might try it again sometime. I've like the cyborg / humanoid robot concept. It might be fun to carry that through to a completed piece.