Summer session in the studio is intense. Its three days a week from 9 am – 2 pm but at the same time its so short, only six weeks instead of the months we have in spring and fall. Because of all of this, the Quan Yin statue is a lot farther along in just two days of work than I had expected. I suspect that by the end of Monday she will be ready to start the slow drying process. If all goes well with that, she’ll go into a bisque kiln in the Fall.
On Monday the dragon finally got his limbs back (I had to take the draft versions off to get all his scales done) and horns! now he’s still cute, but a teeny bit more mature looking (he thinks).
Tuesday I had planned to do QY’s hands, but in order to do that, I had to finish cleaning her up. That and the addition of the texture on the base (“Swirling vortex clouds” anyone?) took up most of the day.
Before:
After:
All of which means, next Monday, she gets hands. This actually gives me the weekend to experiment with some ideas I have for how to make them look the way I want them too. With fimo you can use wire armature to build sculpture over because that is only heated a hundred or so degrees. With clay, the first firing is 1800 degrees and the second can be as high as 2700. Armature melts very quickly that way. I know of at least one sculptor who uses metal under clay but he has a rig in the kiln to catch the metal run off. I don’t have that option in a school setting, so I’m pondering other ideas. We shall see how they work out!
Quan Yin gets a dragon: Left side=rough in Right side=with scales and more details:
and this week:
