Tuesday, January 21, 2014

2014/365 Day Art Challenge, day 20 Research!

Well, tonight I don't have photos to show you. I spent a very unsettling day doing research for working with the clay I made this week. I was trying to figure out the best way to make an armature for laying the layer of clay over. There are several different types that Jonni uses in her blog, and all have their best uses, or so it would seem. I watched several videos on how to make a cat statue, figure, um, you get the idea! I want to do an angel. I need to figure out a way that will help make the tall, vertical shape more stable. My thoughts keep coming back to widening the dress bottom to counter-balance the tall part. Fair enough.

Then I got to thinking about what was the hardest aspect of creating a face. That's easy, the eyes. I always seem to "squish" them if I try to make a dimensional face, and then set the eyes in and shape the lids around them. I have a really hard time carving them into the face, too. That's probably because I make my sculptures on the small side, and then the details become even smaller (and more difficult to do!) Then last night, I had a dream that said, make the eyeballs separately, so they are hard and then put them into the face, viola'! No squished eyes. For any of you who sculpt figures, this might seem a little silly, to go on about eyes like this, but they really are the most important aspect a good figurative sculpture can have. With this paper clay, making them would be not only simple, but incorporating them would be equally doable.

So I had to think Eyeballs, what do they really look like? They are a lot bigger than you think, for one, and the pupils don't take up that much of the total surface. They fit a lot further into the head than I might have thought, too. So now I have to take some time and create dimensionally correct sized balls to go with the head I am considering.  What to make them out of, how to paint them, and make them fit into the armature.What a squeemish subject to have to do research on! So I decided to make several different sizes to play with, and got creative with how to make them. I tried rolling balls of clay into round forms, but they will take forever to dry. Also, I couldn't quite keep them symetrical and stable enough to stay round. So I did some speelunking in my supplies and finally came up with putting a thin layer of the clay around beads. I had some pearl beads that were unusable because their holes were far too tiny. They are now different sized clay eyeballs. I hope they work, but if they don't no money down the drain, only learning! 

I didn't take photos of the clay covered balls, I didn't think you'd really be interested. But I do consider this a creative day, even if those balls were actually all I made. So come back again tomorrow and see what they look like after I try to paint them! I hope to have some of the armature done as well. Goodnight!

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