, costs about $100-140 and is well worth it. I’ve burned up seven ordinary $25 glue guns in the past two years. This orange beast can effortlessly put out several pounds of glue a minute. It requires specific shaped glue sticks available in 11-pound boxes. You can find great deals on the web.Fin mechanism prototype
It is time to revisit the mechanism that will move the fins. My primary reason for building this particular project was to learn mechanical movements. After I finished sculpting, I set aside a week to really figure this out.
The objective is a caterpillar motion, with a change in speed, that varies between a small flutter and a large sweeping motion, and these two motions cannot be synched. My engineering friends Kim Hall, Paul Illian, Pasha Amigud, and Bill Jeswine offered abundant suggestions. We began with frantic scribbling on napkins and available paper, accentuated with lots of hand movements and shuffling through the Grainger Catalog.
The next step was to build a super-rough prototype from available steel, bolts, screws, wood, glue, baling wire, and PVC. Have a look at it after the jump.
Preparing for molding
My team and I are preparing the sculpture for molds. We’re taking off the pieces that need to be done separately: the ears, arms, and fingers. We’ve made a mounting bracket of scrap lumber and steel to hold the arms so it will be easy to get around them. We reuse the bracket materials after each job.
Another photo after the jump.
Mounting the small parts
The small parts — fingers, ears, and fin bases — all get their own molds. We use cheap chopsticks to anchor them to sheets of 3/4-inch plywood.
Specific techniques after the jump.
The big molds (1)
I’ve already illustrated the molding process with the hair (see Moldmaking: the hair one, two, three, four), so I’ll just touch on the high points.
It is very rare today for a sculptor to do monumental work like the Red Silk Mermaid. An artist may sculpt only four or five such pieces in her whole career. The opportunity to make molds at this scale is equally rare, and it offers a terrific learning experience. A team of helpers can accomplish weeks of work in a matter of days. Their assistance is enormously valuable.
To find volunteers, I simply email all my friends in the industry and ask them if they know of anyone who would benefit from this study. In return for the volunteers’ assistance and labor, I introduce them to this work and show how it’s done in a professional studio. True, this is an informal atmosphere and not a standard lecture, but I require the volunteers to get their hands dirty in the process — often for the first time.
Photos of the volunteers in action after the jump. (more…)
BIg molds (2): Mother molds and mold legs
Six volunteers today. We finished the mother mold shells and began to put the supporting legs on each piece. We’re doing the legs slightly differently from the hair because the pieces are so large. Instead of using a platform to measure all the supports, we’re just making them really long. We’ll cut them to length later.
Two more photos after the jump.
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The big molds (3): Opening
Three things today: cutting the legs to length, removing the bolts, and opening the shells. We used a contractor’s laser level to sight down the legs, then cut them off with a SawzAll. We then carefully removed the bolts from all the pieces — this took hours!
Near the end of the day, we used a few dozen screwdrivers to remove the first few shells. You can see them after the jump.
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Dying the fin silk
[Left to right: Jasmine Gilbert, Kim Graham, Owen Wolf]
We have begun experiments on the silk for the fins. Owen Wolf, who has been dying fabrics for more than a decade, is working with us find the right look for the Mermaid. My good friend Jasmine Gilbert, a fabulous costumer, is helping with the coloring.
This is the first layer of intense silk dyes. We will set these with steam tonight and then do the second layer tomorrow. It may take many layers, and quite a few attempts, to get the complexity of texture we are looking for. But it is a joy to finally be working with the colors.
Silk dying technique
We have chosen a stretchable silk that can handle all the movement without too much buckling.
We drew the pattern for the dorsal fin with a light pencil and masked the white areas with a liquid resist, then allowed the resist to dry. Next, we stretched the silk on a wooden frame with bulldog clips and rubber bands. After treating the fabric with vinegar, we drew the two silk dyes, intense yellow and magenta, onto the surface. With the vinegar treatment, it is astonishing how much control you can have with the movement of the color; it is very much like watercolor painting.
After the silk dries, Owen will steam it tonight to set the color into the surface.