Brian Weir the Head of Student Services
Probably one of the most challenging assignments I have ever done. It took me two days after the deadline to complete but here it is!
When I was first told that I was going to be making this to put in the student bar I was really excited about it because who doesn't love a good Roman Senatorial bust? Then I started thinking about it and how it involved working on another human being, how I have incredibly limited sculpting skills, and decided that doubts didn't really have a place in this project and I was just going to make like Captain Kirk and make stuff up as I go along.
Also this project is really just a huge pun. The "head" of student services. Puns are one of my favorite things.
The head cast went pretty smoothly except that I didn't check the battery in the mixer and Dom came in and switched the battery in like two seconds which was magical. It was fine after that with my instructor Rorie and classmate Sierra helping me out. Alginate is really squishy. I like that.
After the alginate mold of Brian Weir's head was filled with plaster and that dried, I pried open the mold and the plaster cast was pretty good! That got stuck on an armature made out of wood and screwed down to the table.
I built up the chest area with newspaper and then added plaster over the top. The balled up newspaper weren't as tightly rolled up as they should have been and kept sliding down when the plaster was applied. Part of this is due to my long-running feud with any sort of tape. Taping things just never goes well for me. In the end the plaster dried and everything was locked into place.
Next I modeled the hair and the shirt collar out of wax. It was a little cool out and I probably should have used a heater or heat gun more often when I was starting out. Life lessons. The hair took me a long time. I knew in my head how I wanted it to look, and I could draw out on paper how I wanted it to look, but the process of translating that into wax is something that I am getting better but still struggle with.
I took a small break from the hair to drape some plaster bandage over the torso to make the toga. It seemed like a logical and good idea at the time but even with the Artex to thicken up the folds it just didn't lay or end up looking like I thought it would. If there is a next time I think I'd rather attempt making a sheet out of wax and draping it that way. More life lessons.
The ears. Oh man. The day that I started the ears I couldn't get them right no matter how hard I tried and all those doubts I had in the beginning resurfaced. It's really frustrating when you're working in one medium and you know you could be doing a much better job in another. I could make a charcoal or pastel drawing of this bust and make it look 500x better than it looks right now. So that night I went home defeated, bought some donuts and watched Iron Man Three. But while I was watching Iron Man Three I started staring at everyone's ears and how they worked and what they looked like when they turned their heads.
The next morning I knocked out the ears fairly quickly considering I had spent the entire day before silently crying under the table over the ears. The plinth was carved out of polystyrene and covered in a paintable hard coating that made it more of a stone texture and less of a bubbly texture. I also filled the bottom of the bust with clay and made a rock texture with Rorie's 1200 (give or take) year old Roman concrete which was incredibly appropriate. The whole thing got covered in a layer of PVA glue.
There was nothing left to do but make a bed of newspaper (and more fighting with tape) and tip it onto it's back so I could build a wall of clay around the bust so I could paint a layer of silicon on one side of it to make a mold. Silicon takes a long time to dry. One thing that I'm not used to when working in Photoshop and other drawing media is incredibly long drying times. What do you do with all of that extra time and how to you plan to use that time effectively instead of getting multiple cups of coffee and playing Pokémon? I know it's something that comes with practice but as a person who normally works fairly quickly it's really hard and throws me off how long I think things will take me. Again, more life lessons.
After the silicon is a layer of acrylic resin and fiberglass to make it rigid and strong. Because of material and time constraints we didn't do two layers of silicon to make the mold super strong, but it would be enough to make at least one bust of Brian Weir and that's all that was needed. Once that was done and dry the bust was flipped and the silicon and fiberglass process was repeated on the other side.
Then there was ripping the original bust out of the silicon mold and tearing it into bits. Incredibly cathartic and fabulously fun.
Once the silicon/fiberglass mold was free of debris and washed, I mixed together acrylic resin, alpha plaster, and some actual marble dust and coated the two halves with a nice layer of it for the outer shell. Once that was dry the two halves were tied together and filled with more resin and plaster along the seams to keep them together and make it stronger.
After that the mold filled with an expanding foam center. I also managed to let go of the cup as I was mixing the foam and spray it all over my pants because I might be a little klutzy. I was informed that it's really not a great idea to have reactive chemicals on your pants and headed to the bathroom to change into Sierra's work overalls. At least my tights were still fine that I had on under my pants. I walked home to change/eat lunch and then continued to fill the center with foam. The bottom was capped off with a little plaster.
Rorie had to get the final bust out of the mold. there was no way I would have been able to do it myself without damaging it and probably myself. There were some broken bits on the final thing but since I was going to make it look distressed in the first place I wasn't too bothered about it.
Next came sanding it down. First with a dremel to get rid of all the big seam and other rough bits and then with wet/dry sandpaper to give it a smoothness and a shine.
The last day was painting day. Painting is within my comfort zone, and though it's not something I want to get stuck doing (because I can already do it and I want to learn other things) it's always nice to know exactly what I'm a doing because I hadn't the whole project. I filled a couple holes with filler and then got to painting the plinth honey mustard yellow, which was a brilliant move though not everyone thought so at the time. The bust got a good coat of a sealer that gave it some extra shine and it even dulled down the white of the seam. I used two of Jen's sponges and some borrowed acrylics because all of mine is in Apopka being very useful in my desk to add a darker grayed-out purple over the honey mustard and really get into the grooves. I used a lighter yellow color over that and used more Titanium White than I had planned but I liked the chalky look that it was getting and it worked out for the better.
Once the rock was done I made some green/black/burnt sienna colored water to strategically pour over the head. I ended up having made it too strong and used a cup of clear water to pour on top of what already had the pigment to dull it down a bit and make the streaks less pronounced.
I'm really prone to nitpick at my own stuff and there is a lot I would have liked to have done differently but on the whole I learned a lot and that's why I'm paying to go to grad school so I think it's a success. On the whole I'm happy with it. I hope he has a long life in the Student Union Bar and they put lots of seasonal and funny hats on him.
