I wanted at least one of my works in my Senior Showcase to be a life size bust so I looked around at all the people I knew for someone with a good face for sculpture. I got up the nerve and asked a man I saw fairly often if he'd be willing and he agreed to be my model. However, I wanted the sculpture to be more meaningful than just a bust recording what a person looked like once. I wanted an expressive figure sculpture that was just from the chest up. I wrote a blog post about this concept back when I was planning out what I could do.
In the end I decided that the strongest concept I could think of would compare the man to a baby so I came up with a pose I liked. Eventually a lot changed and I figured out how to incorporate some imagery of a strong weathered tree. So how about some pictures now!
Here's the little maquette that I made to figure out if the pose would work. I changed things around a lot by the end, but I brought this to show my model when I was photographing him. That way he would have a guide for his pose as I took pictures and he'd have the comfort of knowing what I was going to do with his face.
I built an armature based on one of the methods Philippe Faraut uses and got to work.
I realized at about this point that if I finished the piece as I had done the maquette that I'd have to sculpt his complete arms, which would mean raising the whole piece up several inches and also it would mean the final sculpture would probably weigh more than I could carry so I came up with a different way for him to hold the baby. Then I stressed about making the baby look not creepy.
And it seemed acceptable. Some babies aren't overly cute in real life.
Once I got the basic human elements in place I invited another model in to help me think of organic tree-like forms.
This model held still for me really well.
I got the piece looking a lot like I wanted it to then I needed to hollow it out. If your clay is too thick or wet, or has air trapped inside of it with no way to escape, it can cause your sculpture to crack or worse in the kiln as it's fired.
It worries people when they walk into the room and see that you've cut the head off of the sculpture you've been working on for over a month.
I got it back together and had a lot of fun sculpting the hair and beard. This picture looks a little weird because he clay changes colors as it dries.
So the sculpture was fired in a kiln at about 1900 degrees then I painted it with a faux bronze technique. I didn't take any pictures during that process but maybe I'll explain it in another post sometime.
This was a super fun sculpture to work on and I like how it turned out. I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on it and that's always encouraging.
I hope you didn't get too bored! I wish I had some pictures of me actually working on the piece, but I was the only one documenting my progress. Maybe another time.
Until next time!
-Kenneth
