At long last we are removing the rubber molds from the clay. It slips off with astounding ease. This haunting image shows the inside of the face mold. Good, clean, and without flaw.

Two more photos after the jump.

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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.

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[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.

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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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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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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…)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Here are some tricks for sculptors frustrated by bilateral symmetry.

First, impress a brightly colored string on the exact centerline of the face, then shine a light exactly on the center string. This makes the differences between sides glaringly apparent and consequently easier to fix.

Second, notice the terminus line — the delineation between light and shadow. You can get this line really sharp by bringing the light close to the sculpture. Concentrate on just sculpting along the terminus line. By moving the light up and down along the centerline, you can capture the volumes more accurately.

Last, take a picture of the piece and put it on your computer screen. Even now, I noticed a bunch of problems just writing this entry! Flipping the image horizontally also makes problems, and therefore solutions, really obvious.

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Yeah! The benefit of a Seattle snowstorm that put a foot of snow on the ground: five uninterrupted days trapped in the studio, sculpting.

She is pretty much done and ready for molding. We will begin the molds in four days, the day after Christmas. This will give me time to go over every inch of her to recheck the subtle details, and give my friends time to come over and see her.

Exhausted, happy, elated!

(More photos after the jump.)

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Some headway on the face and hair.

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It took me 12 hours to rough out the hands. When I gave her the harp, I realized the harp needs to be thickened up a lot.

Hands are one of the great joys of sculpting. An aspect of the human form is the juxtaposition between the hard bony structure of, say, the elbow, and the soft fleshiness of the surrounding muscles. In the hands, the dance between these two textures is very complex. The bones are like stones in a river with the muscles flowing around them. There is movement, turbulence, and exciting interaction of hard versus soft, rigid versus pliable.

This difference gives the human figure a dynamic quality. Too much softness, and the figure becomes flaccid and uninteresting; too much hardness, and the figure is brittle. Each texture has to be expressed with clarity and distinctness. This is what makes the hands so delightful to sculpt.

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Yesterday was hands and elbows. When I finished those, I invited my sculptor friends over to critique and correct the work. Today we got the torso cleaned up and sketched in the belly-dancing top. This will be covered with real fabric and beads, so there is not a lot of detail.

Another week and I’ll begin the moldmaking. It feels wonderful to be at this big benchmark.

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Today I began in earnest to work on the arms. The join to the body is a very tricky area, and it’s taken me most of the day to get it right.