Ive been working on a thing for my friend's birthday and its a whole thing at this point so im gonna document the work.
The piece features 3 elephants representative of my friend, her fiance, and their baby boy. She loves elephants and sunflowers especially, so theyre the focus of this. The foil armatures are a lot... shittier than my usual armatures but i needed to get this done and i couldnt find my wire. While sculpting i reference images of african elephants to make sure i get the shape right. Theyre oddly proportioned beasts. (Please ignore my desk mess)
Open face glass bowl is masked off and filled with expanding foam and rimmed with gold spraypaint. Disregard this because it ended up not even making it to the final product, oops.
I didnt take pics of this because it was messy but i carved down the expanding foam and covered it with a layer of paper clay that i brushed a bunch for texture. Before this, I was cleaning my room and accidentally broke the bowl. Nice. I glued it back together as best as i could and added the rope to the base to hide the expanding foam, absorb shock when its moved, and now, to help hold the bowl together. But then i ran out of rope. Double nice.
(This is actually after i painted the paperclay shhh)
While the paperclay dried i worked on the herd who are fresh out of the oven. (This pic is actually prebake)
I got to painting and documented none of it. I used liquitex burnt umber with a drop of apple barrel matte jet black for the base, then the same raw umber with a little bit of liquitex titanium white. I used appel barrel kings gold, tuscan red, and folk art inca gold for the sunflowers, markings, and toes. While working on the male, i guess i was holding the tusk without realizing, the tusk broke, i dropped it, and the ear broke as well. Since i was midpaint, this was easy to fix and cover but oh my god my soul.
I do have this concept sketch that i traced from one of the pics i took
While i waited for them to dry, i switched back to the terrible bowl that i hate at this point. I painted the paperclay with watered down acrylics of various brown/red/yellows and it ended up looking disgusting but its fine because its going to be covered. The little holes are to help mark where the elephants will fit. I also used acetone to remove the gold spraypaint because it got scratched up while i was working and also after i had to fix the bowl so we'll redo it later (No we wont.). This is fine because it was uneven the first time and i hated it.
Just kidding i kept working on the herd because they needed some more zazz. I made pierogies for lunch.
Ive hit the image limit so this will be continued in a reblog!
All materials: open face glass bowl, expanding foam, paper clay, rope, hot glue, super sculpy, foil, acrylics, assorted moss, faux flowers, tears
