04/02/00 -- Thank Goodness for Splash

Or ... What's that under her butt?

I started sculpting yesterday.  I haven't done anything with clay since I was, like, well, a whole heck of a lot younger than I am now.  I made a pretty cool pegasus in 7th grade with some Sculpey clay, complete with wire coat-hanger skeleton and egg-shaped styrofoam ball for a head.  I'm not sure just how much it looked like a horse, anymore.  Probably not very much.  But it was fun.

I made the pegasus for an English project.  We'd been reading about myths and legends and such.  It was extra credit.  I was already only about 100 points short of the most points I could have for the class, but I liked the class, I was having fun.  What the hell, right?

Oy, if only I could've been that motivated through high school and college.

But anyway... That pegasus was the last major sculpting project I undertook.  After that, I made little animal things, creatures from some of Piers Anthony's Xanth books, dorky things that probably don't look anything like the real thing.   I had leftover clay.  Not much else to do with it.

Then I took ceramics in 8th grade and was a TA for the ceramics class in 9th grade.  Not a lot you can do with flat clay other than make plaques and boxes.  Which is what I did.  I made a couch potato, too.  But you've got to be so careful about air bubbles when you're going to make a clay thing that gets fired.   Air bubble in the wrong place and it cracks or shatters, then no more sculpture.

After that, I did some other ceramics work.  Mostly cleaning poured greenware and then firing it and painting it.  Fun.  But nothing that really resembled sculpting.

So I've got all of these gorgeous chick action figures on my desk at home now, and I was poking around some of the sites and one of the sites has a FAQ from the sculptor.  And I got to thinking.

Maybe I could try sculpting something again.  I've got this idea in my head and maybe...

So I talked about it with a friend of mine online who'd just finished a pretty cool candle-holder sculpture thing.  He sent along some sculpting supplies with sweetie and I started thinking.  I twisted baling wire into a skeleton for her, then let it sit.  Thought about it.

Was I trying something too complex for a first-time effort?   Probably.  Heck, if gave me the chance to fail spectacularly so I wouldn't waste time with it anymore.

Only I'm not sure I failed spectacularly...  I'm not sure I failed at all.

Sure, she needs work.  Her tits are a little screwy and she's got no hands and no face and no hair.  And the detail work is probably going to take me a while longer.  But after 4 hours hunched over a lump of clay and wire, I think I've got something that might turn out pretty well.  Yeah, it'll take practice to make something as cool as the action figures on my desk, but she's not bad for a first effort.

Even if I did have to change my mind from my initial concept (chick with wings diving off of a cliff) because of the weight of clay on wings pulling her down backwards (she became chick with wings splashing up out of water with a water splash holding her butt in place).  She's still not looking too bad.

And I decided that while sculpting doesn't provide the instant gratification that writing does, it provides a whole lot more of it than drawing did.

Maybe I've found another niche.  Boo thinks so.  And I do think I do better in 3-D than I do in 2-D.  I always wanted the lines to come out of the paper, or to go back into the paper.

Then again, maybe I should just stick with writing.  *grin*