Plugbeast!

Look what I found on the porch today! I stumbled upon a wild plugbeast!  These elusive, blind quadrupeds can occasionally be found under desks - usually near power strips.  Needless to say upon finding it I caught it in a jar and released it into a local electronics store where it will be happy and well nourished.

Or, well, in reality I discovered some ancient phone chargers in a drawer and decided that since they weren't much good at charging any phone I still own I might as well turn them into something useful.  And by useful I mean purely decorative with no real practical application.

Here's some process because I think that's neat:

I rather like that last fellow too...

What became of the other charger you ask?

Well, more on that later.

Some Figure Sculpture I Never Posted

I've been re-arranging/compiling my portfolio over the last couple days and I stumbled on a couple figure sculptures I never got around to posting.  The top one was the first chance I ever really got to take my time with a sculpture, definitely a really great experience.  Both sculptures are approximately 24 inches tall.

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

Cast No. 01!

One more snippet:

annnnnd here is the plenary plaster person from the previous post.

And a couple details:

And that's it for this particular venture.  It may receive a patina in the future, though I'm thinking it's unlikely that it'll be anything other than more white.  I also might post some of the shots of the clay iteration at some point.

More on the way, the person in process right now is looking promising, and there's plenty of sketchbook to share.

Yes.

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."

Some thoughts on centaurs ... and a couple more naked clay people, sorry I lied

So first, consider your average, normal if there can be such a thing, Centaur:

smug bastard

We can see a very specific proportion of horse to human.  Human from head to somewhere around the pubis and horse from somewhere around the clavicle through the remainder of the horse.  This brings us to a much less popular mythological creature - the Anti-Centaur:

"WHY DO I EXIST, THIS IS HORRIBLE,
 WHY DID YOU EVEN IMAGINE ME?"

On a separate note entirely, due to time constraints I wasn't able to cast any of these sculptures before the studios had to be cleared out. As a result they all had to be destroyed which I knew from the start and figured if I'm going to do it, might as well have some fun with it.  Here is some of said fun.

Oh, and here are a couple detail shots that I forgot to include yesterday:

Naked Clay People, as promised:

So here's the final round of naked clay people for now, sculpture number 4.  At this point I'll have to make more naked clay people before I can post any more of them...

And that was the conclusion of the first stretch of figure sculpting.  More other stuff on the way, more naked clay people eventually most likely.