where do you get your sculpt ideas from? i havent made anything in like 2 years and i really want to get back into sculpting but i just dont. have any ideas
Oh man. So this has been sitting in my inbox for a day or two while i chew on it because i’ve realized this is a really hard question to answer!! I asked myself how i’d gotten the ideas for some of my recent work, or the sketches i’m planning out right now, and really… it’s just been me looking at my own work. Copying off my own notes. Asking myself “how can i continue to explore this theme i’ve been working in, with the shape and symbol and color language i’ve already built up?”. And that’s not really helpful advice to anyone else, especially if they don’t have an existing body of work to pull from!
So if a lot of my work right now is inspired by my… past work…. There must be a progenitor, right? An ancestral fish-thing that grew legs and crawled out of the sea? following this train of thought, I realized i really CAN trace my work back through its evolutionary tree. My current polymer clay work, which i classify roughly in my head as my “surrealist-y metaphorical-y tarot-y colorful-y narrative-y stuff” branched off from its great-grandparents at pajamas here, beginning the eventual transformation into what i think of as my real primary “style”, when i decided to give this little human-faced freak bright colors and a star pattern.
But how did HE come about? He was actually a bit of an outlier in his litter, sculpted at the same time as a bunch of little alien creatures. When it came time to paint him, i had gotten bored and was out of ideas, so i decided to rather unthinkingly and spontaneously paint some stars on him, and bam, there it is - the evolution of warm blood, or flight, or a big brain, the one tiny mutation that shapes the rest of the species for all time!
But lets trace it back further. why was i making aliens? Because i was beefing up my creature design skills for a scifi webcomic i had been raising in my head for the past few years. Why scifi? Because my sibling is a huge star trek nerd, and we brainstormed the premise and characters together.
Another example: my current clay work. I can trace most of the forms i’m using right now back to my pit firing days, where the extreme limitations of that medium really informed my work. Pit firing (or MY pit firing, at least) has a high failure rate, and even pottery that makes it through the firing without exploding is still very soft ceramics, and can be broken easily. So i made forms that were simple, sturdy, and that i could make a lot of at a time (so that if i lost a 25% or even 50% of my pieces, it wouldn’t be HOURS of sculpting work down the drain).
But when i was able to start taking pottery classes again and fire in a kiln, some of the limitations of pit firing disappeared. kiln-fired pieces are harder when finished, have a much higher survival chance, and can be glazed. Still, I kept working with the shapes i was familiar with, but with a little more freedom to push them into new things. Those round blobs with faces became slightly more complex blobs with faces, and glazes, and wings and feet!
I’m not sure how much sense i’m making, but i guess what i’m trying to get to is that none of my sculpture ideas come to me “spontaneously”. They’re all a result of an artistic evolution and exploration. Usually, they’re a happy accident that i then decide to run with. And the more work i make, the easier it is the think of the next thing, because i DONT have to make something up out of whole cloth, but continue with the momentum i’ve already built up. This might sound really discouraging, if you don’t have that creative momentum. And it can be hard to build up that momentum! But for me the only way to get ideas has been to make things. At first it might be hard to figure out what to make. What you make at the start might be fairly arbitrary (aliens because your sibling is a fan of star trek) or rooted in the limitations of the medium you’re working with (stout little unglazed faces because you’re pit firing) but if you keep making things, you will start to find these little pathways of inspiration to follow and chase, and before you know it you will be somewhere different. I believe that art always builds on itself. It’s an accumulative thing.
But i can also tell you that i would never be able to put in the time it takes to build up such an evolutionary tree without having fun with it. So that’s my main piece of advice: make sure you’re enjoying yourself! The rest will come :^)
