Caricaturia
October 25, 2009 by cynthia
Ever get so busy doing art that you’re not actually doing art?
That’s been me for the last two months. It’s been that long since I actually sculpted. Made molds, fired glass, did a lot of coldworking and waxstuff and display designing and openstudio-ing, but actual SCULPTING?
Nope. No wonder I was getting antsy.
Yesterday afternoon I hauled out the clay, sliced off some bits and started in.
She’s the first in a series of nine caricatures, part of an idea I’ve had brewing for at least a year. She’s a lot smaller than I normally work, only about a third life-size. I get this terrible “what if I don’t really know what to do” anxiety whenever I open a new bag of clay, but she pretty much flew out of my fingers, as if she’d been waiting right at the tips.
Update: Finished her brother, #2, and am halfway through #3. I think I’ll just keep posting these in the same slideshow as I get through them. I’m not gonna jinx it by talking about who these people are, but I suspect you can tell if you look closely enough.
Anyway, I want to get these churned out, mastermolds made and waxes set up so I can start playing with these. I haven’t decided exactly how I’ll cast them yet–there are three good possibilities fighting for dominance in my brain right now–but I have plenty of time to think about it.
Thanks for sharing Cynthia.
If you don’t mind sharing some more, why do you drip in the silicone?
Tony
Oh, simple: I don’t have a vacuum pump handy to de-aerate the silicone once I’ve mixed it, and I don’t want bubbles on the surface of that model. So I put the silicone in a paper tub, suspend it about four feet over the model, and poke holes in the bottom of the tub.
The silicone has a low enough viscosity that it drips out of the bottom fairly fast. As it falls, the stream attenuates until its diameter is smaller than the bubbles. Then surface tension comes into play and the bubbles pop on the way down. The stuff that lands on the mold is bubble-free.
Usually I let the first quarter-inch or so fill all the mold surfaces, then the stream gets slower as we get to the end of the working time. At that point I dump the rest in, bubbles or no. And yeah, sometime I’ll have to get a vacuum pump.
This particular silicone is a marvelous, translucent one that lets me make one-piece molds with amazingly deep undercuts. I use a bunch of different silicones and urethanes, depending on the model and what I’m doing with it…so far this one (Silicones Inc. GI-1110) is my favorite.
Enjoyed viewing the slide show & your progress with sculpting, but was surprised to see a middle finger high salute in one of the photos…you might want to crop it out. I guess I am one of those people that see all the details in a photo.
Nice texture with the male faces.
Uhm, really? I’ll have to go back and look…oh….didn’t see it. I use turntables when I’m working, and my favorite configuration right now is the clay on the easel on the short turntable on the long turntable. Gives me just the right height, but the the short turntable tends to swivel when I’m trying to photograph. I probably put the finger out to hold it in place for the process shot.
Good catch…it didn’t add that much to the sequence, so I took it out. More uploads in a sec.