, 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.Pretty happy
Some headway on the face and hair.
Hands and harp
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.
Torso cleanup
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.
Arm sculpting is tricky
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.
Mermaid re-armed
The arms are back on and the scales are nearly done. Yeah!
A friend of mine, who helps work on hydroplane speed boats, is here in the studio making an intake cowling. You can see it behind the mermaid.
He had never clayed up an automotive part before; instead he had been using fiberglass, foam, and bondo. Yecch! I am showing him how to get really beautiful sweeping lines across the cowling. It takes time, but you can really control the shapes this way.
See woman merge into fish after the jump!
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Fin design
To begin the fins, I made really tight sketches of their shape and pattern, taking them from my original “Coral Mermaid.”
I traced the patterns onto acetate. This time I used pink to construct a grid on the other side of the acetate in a one-foot pattern. This trick prevents distortion in the overhead projector.
More photos (and fishing rods!) after the jump.
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Musical scales
I’m doing the back scales. Scales, strangely enough, are something I simply love to sculpt. There is a wonderful underlying pattern that transitions through the surface. The best way I can describe it is through music.
When I am sculpting, I have to hold in my mind a certain type of music — in this case a classical piece. The large scales near the dorsal are the oboes, wide deep complicated woodwind sounds. The tiny surrounding scales are the piano, a delicate accompanying sound, light and airy. The delineation scales, the ones that separate the top from the bottom, are the drum beats, distant and low. There are other instruments too, small and less prominent, to fill in the sound and round it out.
Working this way is a lot like being a conductor. You sculpt the sound. It is easy to see that the composition of these scales is not, say, a rock and roll beat, nor punk — but they could be jazz. By thinking this way, I find it easier to hold the thought of the patterns in my mind for long periods of time.
The fins, with the silk and lace, will be the violins. These undulating notes wrap themselves around all the other ones and give them unity.
Sculpting the belly scales
Had a hell of a good day yesterday. I figured out the pattern for the belly scales, and I am expanding them today.
Humbling
There are days when I am humbled by the amount of information I do not know. The face had been giving me trouble for five days. It was some subtle something that made the jaw too heavy, the nose too short, and the face pinched and cross-eyed. Today I moved the upper edge of the lower lip down two millimeters. With a suddenness that was jarring, the entirety of the face snapped into focus. The features went from dull and unsatisfying to beautiful within seconds.
Jeez. There is so much to learn.
Back to sculpting
Finally, back to sculpting! Gal’s got a new haircut. The face is weird, but now I have enough clay to work with.
Two more photos after the jump.
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Moldmaking: the hair (4 of 4)
To open the mold, remove all the bolts and place screwdrivers in the seams. It is easier if you work three or more sides at once. As one opens up and stops, another will have just enough leverage to move more.
Lots more photos after the jump.
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Moldmaking: the hair (3 of 4)
I have encased the T-nut side of all of the bolts first, using a polyurethane resin reinforced with polypropylene fiber. It goes on fast and cures almost instantly.
Again, many more photos after the jump.
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Moldmaking: the hair (2 of 4)
Here I’ve applied the first, really thin coat of rubber. It flows like honey and gets somewhat messy. This captures all the detail.
I am using Mold Max 30 high-tear-strength silicone rubber from Smooth On Corp. Used with the thickening agent Thi-Vex, this rubber has the most wonderful creamy texture, and it will hold onto a surface upside down.
Many more photos after the jump.
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Moldmaking: the hair (1 of 4)
(As mentioned in “Hair finished – but I need clay,” I decided to mold the mermaid’s hair ahead of the rest of the figure, so I could reclaim the clay for use elsewhere on the sculpture. I describe the entire process of molding the hair using nearly two dozen photos over several posts.)
I start with carefully removing as many of the difficult-to-mold hair pieces as possible — 29 individual bits, plus the main mass! Again, this is shocking; typically there may be two to five additional pieces. I carefully number both each bit and its connection point.
More pictures after the jump.
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Hair finished – but I need clay!
By the time I transferred the back, I had nearly run out of clay. I decided to finish the hair, put it in molds, and then retrieve that clay. The hair alone uses about 120 pounds of clay, and even that may not be enough.
Finishing the hair took 17 days total — a shocking amount of time on such an area. I was determined, though, to do something remarkable.
