What I’ve Been Up To Lately

I’ve always been able to sculpt – I’ve just never done it.  It’s been a strange sensation, having that realization sitting around untested, occasionally surfacing and teasing me with possibility.  The very few times I’ve done anything along these lines it’s blossomed easily under my hands – but it’s never really been tested, because I didn’t have the time or resources (mostly time though) to invest in refining it.

I came close while I was in Seattle working for Amazon – while I was still naive enough to think that I’d have more time on my hands (this is a fallacy for Amazon employees – it’s a great company, but when you work for Amazon that’s pretty much ALL you do), I contemplated getting some materials together and trying it out.  I did some research, started sketching out some sculpture ideas, and made some plans – but then changed to a much smaller studio apartment with hardwood floors; working with polymer clay in that environment with 3 cats seemed a losing proposition to start with, so I bought an EWI instead.

While making those plans though, I was more sure than ever that the talent was there – with one sculpture concept I couldn’t get the sketches of the beastie to turn out right, so I grabbed a sheet of aluminum foil and made the face out of that: and then proceeded to sketch it off of that reference. For my most recent birthday, Rachelle bought me all the stuff I would need to really try it out, putting money where my mouth was much the same way we did in setting up her photo studio eight-plus years ago.

Organic shapes came as easy as I’d expected:

A rough draft of organic elements in unlikely juxtaposition of species

I would need armature wire to start building anything with substance though (such as I’d sketched previously), so I had to work on smaller scale projects.  I figured I’d book some flight time in a simulator first – doing simple projects, tearing them down, and then set my mind on committing to a small project I could do without the wire (which I subsequently acquired, but I’m still finishing this one out first) that would use a minimal amount of the clay and familiarize me with its characteristics and my tools for working with it.  The project in question is a 17th-ish century tower-top observatory, with absolutely no concern for period accuracy (or even scale, really) – off the cuff, just for fun.

Tower floor beginnings

Head-mounted stereoscopic magnification is a must for long sessions

Amanda wanted me to make her a lamb, which hung around and supervised construction.

Post stone, pre wood

Mandy's Lamb

Completed floor

A grain of rice makes its first appearance to provide scale reference:

Stone and wood texture detail

Rough desk form

Lock detail

Desk ornamentation and surface objects

Candle detail

That dark bar in the middle of the quill is the wire out of a twisty tie in order to hold it up – this sheet of clay is thin enough it shows through as white, and won’t possibly stand up under its own weight.  The large hole in the inkwell underneath it is where I stabbed it through with a straightpin to help it adhere to the desktop and haven’t filled in yet.

Quill detail

If you look closely you can see the bookmark ribbon is forked at the end, and that the loose-leaf paper on the right contains stellar observations (Ursa Major’s indication of Polaris).

Book and paper detail

The chair is still very much in progress, with only the chairback and cushion completed in this photo.

Chair detail

Still has a way to go, including the storage chest next to the desk and the telescope, and lots of polishing and refinement after that: I’ll need to go through and smooth out tooling marks, and then set the whole thing in the oven.  I don’t plan on painting it since my skills definitely do NOT as present tend that way – maybe I can get some of the gaming mini painters in the area to swap me work, where I customize minis for them in exchange for getting a nice paintjob (hint hint, all ye readers).

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