What I was doing for the 2 weeks I didn’t have to blog…
Hi Peoples! This blog post is going to be me catching everyone up on my antics from the past two weeks. Like I said in my first post, I couldn’t help myself and started early (with the green light to do so).
Anyway, I started building my monstrosity on February 4th so let me start from the beginning. Strap in because this is probably going to be a long post, there is a lot to catch up on. But that’s okay cause I have pictures galore!
Before February 4th I sketched my ideas on my iPad using an app called Procreate. I’m not sure how much sense they are going to make but I’m giving them to you anyway. Brief explanation before you see the photos, unless you have already skipped to them :(. I wanted it to be more human than monster but I still wanted something about it to seem not quite right. So what I decided to do is build a door frame. Stay with me! This will make sense once I explain it (I hope). The idea was that everything in front of the door frame will be more human while everything behind the door frame will be more monster. It’s almost like when you look at the sculpture head on, something isn’t right but the only way to see what that is is by walking around the sculpture and seeing everything (does that make sense?). I wanted the pose to be like the person is almost trying to run away from this thing that is coming after him and basically trying to consume him. It is like this person is trying to hold onto their humanity and get away from something that is trying to take it away in a sense. Anyway, that was a lot of words so here are some nice pictures!
The first thing that I needed to do was to get supplies, so guess what? Off to The Home Depot with my mom! (thanks mom). I wanted to get materials in order to build a base where the sculpture could stand on but I knew that once I started building it that it would be really heavy and hard to move. So I got wheels. I also got things like screws, PVC pipe, 4X4s, couplings, and a massive piece of wood. here’s a picture of everything all nicely laid out just for you guys and totally not because I like laying materials out.
After I got $158 worth of materials (a lot I know, but I’m just gonna go off into a little side tangent for a bit because their is a really nice story to this that I have to tell! After my mom and I finished getting all the materials we went to the cashier because there was no way we were doing self checkout. The cashier saw the weird concoction of items that we had and asked just what we were doing with it. I told him about my senior project and explained to him what I was building and he so kindly gave me a student discount for 10% off on every item and I saved $16. It was a really nice interaction and definitely a memory I won’t forget anytime soon).
Anyway long side tangent aside, I started building the base and making it sturdy enough for even my 250lb brother to stand on (and jump on, I didn’t know he was gonna do that and it scared me when he just did it with no warning). I built the base and the door frame. Here’s a picture for your convenience!
Don’t mind the mess. It gets messier.
After the base was complete I started working on the shape of the sculpture itself. Yay. I had a specific pose that I wanted the person to be in so I started to cut the PVC pipe into specific pieces (fun fact! I used my brother as the basis of measurements for my sculpture. Which means I would randomly go up to him and ask if I could quickly measure his arm, hip, torso, or leg :). Another fun fact! my brother has a 2ft arm exactly). Once I got the basic shape of the pose that I wanted, I glued everything in place with PVC glue so it wouldn’t move. Guess what? Another picture for your convenience of course!
For some of the PVC pipe the couplings weren’t the right angle that I wanted so I melted it with a heat gun and bent the pipe till it was just right. Or till it was close enough. After I finished getting the basic shape of the human it was time to work on the monster that would be coming out of him! Yay. (I do love what I’m doing but after hours of smelling burnt PVC pipe you kind of get sick of it. Literally, my head was fuzzy).
After I got the basic shape of the monster I attached it onto the human then attached the monster arms onto the door frame for extra stability, because there is never enough of that! I’m going insane. But you know what will help. You guessed it, another picture. Yay!
Actually two pictures. Double yay! Do these pictures look blurry or is that just me? 🙁
Anyway, I attached the monster on the back to the door frame and both the feet to the floor. As well as putting little pieces of wood in all of the corners for extra strength. Omg, another picture so soon! Crazy.
Don’t mind the two big wood pieces in the middle. I put them there to theoretically help. Did they? To be determined.
After everything was attached I packed the thing with so much tin foil. I’m not even kidding, I spent an entire week just putting tin foil on this thing in order to bulk up the shape and so I could use less clay later on. I never want to touch tin foil again. Turns out, tin foil can be really sharp when working with it in the way that I did. I had a lot of Band-Aids on my hands for that week. I put the tin foil on by using hot glue to stick the pieces together and would rip off a piece, form it into a ball, and glue it on until I had my desired shape. This one you have to read a little bit more for than the previous one, but another picture! whoo! There’s a lot for this part though.
Wow! Four pictures. It’s like a reward.
After being done with the tin foil (finally). I started to add clay on. Monster clay is an oil based clay, which means that if you put it into the microwave it will melt into a liquid. So it is really nice to work with because it is super malleable and it never fully dries out. For example, I could be working on one part of the sculpture and decide I don’t want to do that anymore and start working on another part. The only thing I have to do is heat the clay back up to a more manageable consistency with something like a heat gun. Anyway, after that explanation I think we deserve a picture or two! Or four.
That is everything that I have done so far, but I have so much more to do. Can you tell that I wrote this at 12am?
Thank you so much for continuing to follow along and I promise that the next post won’t be this long. Probably with less pictures though :(.
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