Closure on the Twister

Disaster struck Thursday, my weakness for building with wood has been brought to the surface. As I was drilling the final platform to my sculpture...SNAP! All my calculations have been busted! With the help of my teacher whom heard the whole thing go down, ran to the rescue drilling boards back to gather as fast as he could. I was so struck and flustered I forgot to thank him..... Thank you Matt! Plan B is now in effect. My sculpture is now a delicate disaster. I don't have the time or the energy to start over, so sacrificing some of the visual appeal is a must happen situation. I have made, what I call a crutch, to the back side of the third platform in order to allow my piece to stand on its own. This crutch is still unstable so further adjusting is going to happen soon. Deciding I needed it, I called for help, my right hand man showed up to help me coat my piece with primer in the freezing cold. This weekend I will finish it off with a coat of light matte gray. Overall I'm pretty sure I have had the help of almost everyone in my class, this project was a huge learning curve for me, but I do love a challenge. I most certainly feel I could now create a more successful wood sculpture in the future.

Morgan and I posing with in my opinion the hardest tool to use, the dreaded drill!

The finished work!

Memory lane, goal 5' and 6"

End of the semester approaching and the pressure is on to complete the final assignment. Our set goal is to create a rendered sculpture from wood, meaning I would have to learn the ways of the power tools. Our work is depicting a past memory, and to take that memory and recreate it's story through distorting any realistic figures, or basically any nouns from being obviously visible. Like in my title, five feet and six inches marks completion, (or sleep) for the assignment calls for one dimension to be at least our bodies height.
Feeling out of my element, I had a few failed beginnings, but have found my way on track. Or at least for now I feel that way. Learning the tools of the wood workers has been by biggest challenge, I have seen my father and brother use them my entire life, but never dreamed I would actually be behind a chop saw slicing through eight foot two-by-fours. I'm feeling more confident now that I finally conquered the power drill. Recalculating my measurement and grasping a better understanding of how wood can be sculpted I have come up with a plan. My piece will depict an abstracted tornado, with swirling winds and threatening bends of energy. My piece sets on three one-foot vertical beams resembling the loose gap tornados seem to have between the ground and it's funneled foot. Then, a platform made from 49 degree triangles glued, nailed, and tightened together into a windmill type pattern are thus glued and nailed to the vertical beams.  Following is another set of beams but are cut with a 48 degree slant and are rotated to begin the tornado's first tight bend. This process is carried out five more times with altering bends and similar but gradually enlarging platforms of windmill like patterns. Ultimately, I am planning on painting my tornado with a solid matte finish. The details to be continued.

...finally closure to my 'Celebration of Diversity'

The never ending project

Here is the continuation of the last blog, you can see the sand pit that held the plater moldings while I poured the molds. Also, the finished plaster heads, which are hand painted all different shades of skin colour and brian colour. Some silly pictures of me enjoying having a bunch of heads on my dining room table. In the end the piece wasn't as successful as I had hoped, but through many difficulties I have to be satisfied at what I was able to accomplish, and learned. I now fully understand the complications of plaster molds.

project head

Project head, my toughest challenge yet. My goal is to create at least six plaster heads just like the top clay piece. I am going to paint a different scene on each of the head's brains, my final concept is a celebration of diversity. I started by sculpting the head out of clay, then while still soft broke the head into six parts and separating the sections with metal plates. Which over lap and gaps sealed with duck tape. Then plaster was applied to a section, once dried, the metal plates where the section was complete were removed. I then make key holes to the plaster sides with a large drill bit, coated them with vaseline, and repeated the process until the entire head was concealed by plaster. Throughout the process my mold  continued to increase, something I wished I had paid more attention to, for in the end caused me extra work and elbow grease. After the mold was dry butter knives were chizled into the seams between the plaster sections in order to loosen and thus break apart the mold. That so far wasn't so bad. With the help of my teacher, I put back together the mold with rubber ties and poured plaster into the mold. Failure. Mold cracks, neck breaks off, a section of the mold is stuck to the head. Non the less, I am still working on fixing the kinds.