Catherine!

Hey, remember all that figure sculpture I was posting a while ago?  Well that hasn't stopped  happening in the meantime.  So in no particular order over the next ... err... arbitrary amount of time, there will be some figure sculpture.  Who knows, maybe some painting too.

Anyway, here's Catherine:

I know it's a little ridiculous but I was really happy with how the signature came out on that one.  Mmmm blackletter.

and here's a full turnaround, conveniently (or obnoxiously) compressed into one enormous jpeg.

Anyways, I'm not dead, and there's more where this came from.

Rob

Plaster!

So here I have a little preview of my fist foray into casting:

These are all I'm going to share for now, unfortunately the rest of the pictures didn't come out so hot, so I'm going to have to re-shoot.  Either way the process was interesting.  Put in shim lines (like fault lines) so the mold can come apart, then coat the clay in plaster, break apart the mold, destroy the clay, put the mold back together, fill it with plaster, then chip off the mold.  I wish I had photographed the process a little, it's really beautiful to watch all the plaster chip away.  When you build the mold up off of your sculpture it sort of becomes this hideous blob of plaster, burlap and metal bars (to help give it structure).  You then chip all of that away, and it just sort of falls off, slowly revealing your sculpture underneath.  Next time I'll take more pictures.

Oh, and while I'm at it, here's some more sketchbook to keep things even.

And to leave off, a comment on a hand I sculpted from Leonid Brener when I studied with him over the summer:

"Everybody knows she has five fingers, find something more interesting to say."

More Figure Sculpture

So, here's some more of this. We have the third attempt, which is more of a sketch - as the time allotted was much shorter than all the others.

My favorite parts are as follows: I like the way his hand drops off into the lump he's sitting on. I also like that he looks like a very stern, naked, news anchor.

More soon, really.

Rob

Figure Sculpture!

So I've wanted to try figure sculpting for some time now but have never had both the time and the opportunity at the same time. Recently however things have come together and I'm sculpting from a real live human at the Art Students League of New York, and it's fantastic! These here are shots of my second attempt, which could use some more work, but the pose is over - on to better things.

And I was wondering if I could get some opinions on this: I like the academic work I do, and I like to share it, but it feels pretty mismatched with the general content that I have here... how do the humans that look at my business feel about it? Do you guys like the more academic "Look! I'm painting!" "Look! I'm sculpting!" is it preferable that it go by the wayside, or maybe somewhere else. Thoughts? Opinions? Irrelevant statements?

Depending on the consensus, there will be more paintings and sculptures shortly.

Oh, and just for kicks here's a couple shots of attempt No. 01 at this whole figure sculpting bit:

That's all for now.

Figure Painting

2/2/09 - around 2-2.5 hours

So I took a bunch of pictures of my figure paintings from fall at the end of last semester with the intent of posting them up here. It's like anything else I'm still in formative stages with, something I thought might have been good when I did it is so quickly overshadowed by further development or simply stepping back from having just made it. As such I'm not sure if those old figure paintings will ever make it up on here.

Anyway, this is my best to date. there are a number of things that aren't terribly resolved, or resolved the way I'd like them to be, but it's probably the best I've done to date.

More heads...

You know what they say about practice...

nowhere near perfect yet, but I'm making ground.

Attempt No 3:

So this one is starting to get towards a likeness, but still quite a bit off. Some features remain generic while others take on the characteristics of the model. I did this in a combination (about 50/50 mixture) of super sculpey and super sculpey firm (the grey and the flesh colored). A step forwards but still not there yet...

If you know the Ringling models, this is Sarah, by the way.

Attempt No. 04:

The closest I've gotten so far, right here, though, after a certain point I just sort of veered off in another direction. It started out looking quite a bit like the model (Allison) but right around when I put the eyes in the sockets and started putting the meat and eyelids on around them I noticed the eyeballs I had made were very much too small... and she started to look like a deranged Asian woman. Since it still looked quite a bit more like a real human being than any of my previous attempts I just sort of ran with it (though I mostly ditched the deranged part).

Anyway, that's how that goes, more to come most likely.

Experiments

So, for the sake of exploration I've been bringing sculpey to figure class and trying my hand at sculpting from life... frankly it's giving me a lot of trouble (getting any sort of likeness... ugh) but it's a grand old time I've gotta say. Here are the first two stabs at it, probably somewhere around 1.5 to 2 hours of work a piece.

Attempt I:

Attempt II:

So they both sort of look like the same face, and I never got around to giving them hair or ears, but hey, I got a little faster the second time and figured quite a bit out (hah... figure...). Anyway, forward ho and all that business.

we'll see where all this sculpting takes me

Mid term figure dump

So I have it figured that rather than dumping everything at once in one super long post, I'll spread my figure stuff out a little better this semester.

To start things off, here is my first figure painting ever.  Hoo-hah.

Approx. 2 Hours

Some quick pastel gestures:

Portraiture: Approx 3 hrs each

vine charcoal and charcoal pencil

Graphite

Marker (Copic Wide)

Somewhere around an hour and a half

5 minutes

Conte Crayon 5-10 minutes

  

5 Minute Color Pastel Gestures

  

Pastel 2-3 hours

And that's everything for now.