sculpture 30
Tiki Mugs
Chipboard Faces
Exaggeration. That's the key to this project. we are going to use chipboard (a compressed type of cardboard that you'd find on the back of a pad of paper). It's stiff but easy to cut. It can be creased and folded. It can be scored with a butter knife to create straight edges that can be folded back and tacked together with hot glue guns. In short, it is a very easy material to build complex forms with. It just takes some getting used to, so be patient.
Below are several examples of sculptures (sorry, i don't have the artists' names for these pieces!) that we can use for ideas. You are going to make your own face, making sure to exaggerate at least one detail. Huge eyes. Tiny mouth. Tiny eyes and a huge nose. Your call. Umm, the first image is a Pablo Picasso sculpture, so don't think cardboard can't be "legitimate" art!)
Paper-Making
Making stuff out of paper - including paper! I'll try and put together a video showing all the steps, but in the meantime, check out some of the cool stuff you can make out of paper and some assorted found objects. Incorporating LED lights, rocks, branches, stones, and other interesting items adds interest!
Press Molds
Press molds are an easy way to begin to get a sense of working in three dimensions. In my opinion working in reductive sculpture is really tough (that's when you are working on something like stone carving - once you cut something away, it can't be added back on). So say I gave you a block of poured plaster and asked you to carve flower and plant forms into it - wow! That'd be so hard to do. That's reductive sculpting. So instead to start out we'll work with pouring molds. (Later this year we'll work on additive sculpture, so if you worked in clay for example. You can take stuff away, but you can also add parts back on).
Check out the video below for a demonstration of what we'll be doing.
I'll show you all how to roll out the clay base as in the video above, but in the meantime the first thing you want to do is decide on what type of items you want to press into the clay. The artist above uses flowers and plants, but you can use anything you like. Choose some items and give them a test - if they have too many undercuts (ask me what that is) the object might get trapped in the clay, so when you go to pull it out it tears the clay apart and you lose the from you're trying to capture.
To add an extra level of quality/interest to your piece, you might want to think about how the objects relate to one another. In the video above they end up with a nice round plant-themed sculpture, to hang on a wall or something, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. But could you send the viewer a message with your items? Could you tell a story, create a metaphor, etc? I bet you could - might make for a stronger piece in the end.
Poured Molds
Ok, so now that you understand a bit of how mold making works, you can get pretty creative with the molds you make. For our next mold making project we're going to do something really simple. we're going to use objects that are already shaped to pour our media into. In the video below it looks like they've used cement (which we could also use) but we could also use plaster. In any case, watch the video below for an example of using two rubber gloves to create a sculpture (well, they make a planter but I bet you can come up with a pretty cool idea to use in your project).
Minimalism and Plasticine
If I asked you to picture a sculpture in your mind, I bet you'd picture something like this:
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) - David
Above is a famous sculpture by the Italian Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, one of my all time favorites. Incredible realism, and hard to believe all carved from marble. Needless to say, maybe a bit higher bar than we'll be able to get over with our first project. Most people picture these kinds of ancient, classical, or Baroque sculptures. But there was a movement towards a much more minimal approach to sculpture when the 1900's rolled around, led by artists like Constantin Brancusi. Take a look at the images below - this is what we want to try and think about with our plasticine sculpture. Simple forms, more abstract than realistic. You will be asked to create three different sculptures for this project, photographing each before you break them up and re-use the plasticine to create your next piece. The final piece you create we will use to make a mold and cast the form in plaster. I'll....explain all that later. For now, check out these pieces.
So as you can see, not exactly like the Bernini sculpture. But deceptively simple maybe. This is a huge shift in the way form is handled, suggesting ideas rather than detailing them. To get started you might try a few things. One might be to just make some very quick sketches and see if any interesting shapes appear. You could also take apiece of string and just drop it onto a page a few times. Whenever the random shapes seem like something you would want to build, trace them out with a pencil and then you'll have at least some base shapes you can work with. Have fun with it. Remember, the plasticine is very hard at first, but if you break or cut it into smaller peices and work it around in your hands it will soften up and become very pliable.
Here are a couple basic pencil sketches that might make for cool sculptures.
