Monday, July 18, 2011

The Stump Tortoise

Having finished my Cthulhu idol and a majorly crazy ink drawing I was mulling over ideas for my next sculpture. I have pages and pages of sketches documenting ideas for sculptures, some of which are in relatively great detail. However, it's always the random scribbles that seem to  jump out at me and demand to be made RIGHT NOW.

I found this while cleaning off a pile of doodles, junk mail, and old grocery receipts from the kitchen table.






It immediately demanded to be made. RIGHT NOW. So, not wanting to piss off whatever Art God or Muse that makes these demands, I set to work on on the armature. I started off with the legs and head.


At first I wasn't quite sure how to approach doing a solid chunk like the tree stump shell. So I just started throwing on wire.



Holy crap that's a lot of wire!

And then I just crunched it full of foil.  And more wire. 


Holy crap that's a lot of foil!

This is probably one of the sturdiest armatures I've built to date, mostly because I sat back and enjoyed building it as a part of the creative process (as opposed to "Blar! Friggin armatures, I just want to get this done with so I can push clay!"). It's also so dense I could probably lob it through a window. 

Of course, with every armature comes the inevitable "Oh god, termites have chewed up my hands!" feeling, which you get from three hours of wrestling wire and foil and accidentally supergluing yourself to every surface in the vicinity. It gets worse the instant you head to the sink to wash off all the metal bits when suddenly you discover "HOLY SH---TINY CUTS EVERYWHERE! IT STINGS!" But it's all good, because the carpal-tunnel syndrome takes care of that, at least for the moment. I'm typing up this post by bludgeoning the keyboard with my half-numb fingers. 

Next up: clay pushing. Hooray!

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