In an earlier post we talked bruises in marble, which are the bane of modern marble sculptors. They’re like a pimple on your sculpture’s nose and there is no effective makeup for marble. Surprisingly, bruising wasn’t an issue for the ancients. In fact, as we’ll see in a different post, the available carving techniques priorContinue reading “Many Kinds of Realism”
Tag Archives: art
The Figure #11: Every Disaster Is An Opportunity
What an ominously Pollyanna-ish title! So here’s what’s going on. I’ve been chewing away at the stone, stripping off the thickest areas to make it easier to drill down to a denser array of points. In a few areas I’ve gone a step farther and taken it all the way down, leaving just enough forContinue reading “The Figure #11: Every Disaster Is An Opportunity”
The Figure #8: Enlarging the Armature
The last post was about setting up the enlarging machine. In video below it gets used for the first time to create the Styrofoam armature for the full size piece. The object is to create a big chunk of styrofoam that’s half an inch to one inch smaller than the finished clay. It’s not anContinue reading “The Figure #8: Enlarging the Armature”
V1.0 Of The Figure Did Not Go To Waste After All
Version one of the model for the figure carving wasn’t quite what was needed. I’d made a mold before deciding to rework it but I’d never poured it. The clay popped out of the mold almost unharmed so it was easy to rework the aspects I didn’t like. I liked the placidity of her postureContinue reading “V1.0 Of The Figure Did Not Go To Waste After All”
A Figure In Stone #7: Setting Up to Enlarge
The video for this really says it all so I’ll keep this text to a minimum. I’ve posted a few times about the enlarging machine but this is the first time I’ve actually set it up to use it. This one is physically setting it up on the bench. In the next one I’ll actuallyContinue reading “A Figure In Stone #7: Setting Up to Enlarge”
Aside: Making a Pneumatic Point Chisel
I have two nice Trow and Holden B-series pneumatic hammers for sculptors. They are sweet little tools, awesome for claw chisels, straight chisels, and bush hammers. The bigger one is the green device in the picture below. Several other companies make similar hammers, but T&H literally invented this type of pneumatic hammer for stone backContinue reading “Aside: Making a Pneumatic Point Chisel”
A Figure In Stone #6: The 1/2 Scale Model
The plan is to start with a half-scale clay model that will be cast in plaster. The half-scale plaster will then be enlarged (using the 3-D pantograph) into a full-size clay. The full-size clay will then cast in a permanent plaster model that can be transferred point-by-point into stone using the traditional pointing machine. HereContinue reading “A Figure In Stone #6: The 1/2 Scale Model”
A Figure In Stone #5: Standing Up Pt 2
Squaring off the bottom so the block could be stood up was interrupted by a mini-hurricane. We continue from Pt 1 which you can find here. It’s all in the video below so I won’t write too much here. If you don’t know how to go about flattening a stone, that’s covered early on. IContinue reading “A Figure In Stone #5: Standing Up Pt 2”
The Figure In Stone #4: The Point Is…
I’ve been pounding away preparing the block and so far, the work has been almost all with the punch, AKA point-chisel, AKA point, AKA bull-point. Worse Than I Thought I knew a significant part of this block was sketchy. It had been left in the weather for many years (not by me) and you couldContinue reading “The Figure In Stone #4: The Point Is…”
The Real Greeks
Neoclassicism is dead and buried but serious sculpture must forever acknowledge classicism’s ghost, if only by whistling past the graveyard. Classicism has always been a Rorschach test for cultures. Generation after generation adopts the symbols and styles of the Athenians of the Fifth Century BCE, but each generation does so in a way that saysContinue reading “The Real Greeks”
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