Of Questions On Clays

I appeal to those of you with experience makin' stuffs. I know you're out there.

This year for art I'm required to make at least two artworks for my final folio presentation, and I'm planning on doing some anatomy/human body type sculptures.

I'd like to make one slightly bigger than A4 sized, length and width wise, and the other I'd hope to make about the size of an actual torso. I've used basic terracotta clays before in class, and the results were pretty good, but I've no longer got access to a kiln, wherein my problem lies.

I'm looking for a relatively cheap clay (or clay-like substance) that doesn't require kiln firing, and can be painted and perhaps varnished, something to that effect. Air dry would be a bonus, as well as light-weight, but I'm willing to pass those up for a better alternative.

Your help is much appreciated and willing particpants won't have their brains stolen in the night.

Unless you're into that kind of thing.

Happy "I didn't get a Valentine" Day

Now, before we start, it'd be supercool if everyone actually watched the video I linked to in the For Future Reference post, but if you haven't, then this will (most likely) make no sense to you at all. 

If you can't be bothered watching the whole thing but still want to know what's going on, then this is the link again, and watch from around the 4 minute 20 mark.

 

 Valentine's Day is a holiday I appreciate more in theory than I do in practise. If you're in a couple, there's too much pressure to choose the right gift and to make everything perfect. If you're single it can be incredibly depressing to be surrounded by other people's flowers, chocolates and happiness.

A quick chat to my friends revealed that even those in a relationship were hating on the holiday - something which, despite my distaste for it, I found rather disheartening. 

So, drawing on a shared love for a certain crazy drunken Irish man who owns a bookstore (Bernard Black), I decided I'd make an Black Books referencing anti-Valentine card.

Also I really wanted a use for the accordion sketches I've been doing lately.

 

 The front of the cards read (in case you can't read my awful handwriting):

I've come to serenade you.

I can't play guitar.

I can't play this either, 

but I thought it would be less obvious.

While the inside reads:

Happy "I didn't get a Valentine" Day

Almost There

The Gardener is done. For now. The fabric really bugs me for a number of reasons, but the main one is that it isn't old-looking enough. Right now though, I don't have the time. Or the initiative. It's done and I don't have to worry about it anymore. Sometime after Halloween I'll post more pictures.

I'm going to be all hyper tomorrow morning when I wake up. And then I'll realise I have to set up a projector and a set of speakers about twice as old as I am, clean the house and tape off doorways. Plus all that little detail stuff which is fun to plan but so time consuming to execute. Really wishing I'd had more time, but there's not much I can do now other than finish off an English assignment. Last English work for the year! Woo!

Learning From Your Mistakes

Some things you have to learn the hard way. I found this out, funnily enough, the hard way last night. Anyone following me on twitter would have noticed my little breakdown when everything seemed to go wrong at once.

As deadlines approach (and go flying past, not even stopping to say hello), I tend to start working on things late at night, because it's time I'm usually awake anyway and I find the hours between 11pm and 2am to be particularly productive, if not occasionally dangerous. I attempted to learn that lesson after I tried taking off my left thumb with a stanley knife a few weeks ago. I told myself that I wasn't going to be doing anything stupid like that again. So it only makes sense that last night I decided it would be a good idea to try and finish the papier mache on The Gardener. Because everyone else in this house seems to sleep (freaks), I had to do it in my room. No big deal. Spread out a few plastic sheets on the carpeted area I was working over, thought everything would be fine. And it was, for the most part.

Then I decided I should lean the thing against my desk while I go get a drink. I don't know why I thought this was a good idea. The Gardener is incredibly heavy. He's got two pieces of rather thick timber making up the cross, and in order to get it to stand up but still be portable, he's got a steel pipe hidden up the back of his cross, so I can just shove a metal rod in the ground and shove him on it. Of course, however brilliant that sort of forward thinking may be, it's pretty useless when you're carting the thing around indoors and looking for things to lean it against. You can't lie him on his front because you'll crush his ribcage. Can't lie him on his back because of the vines and the metal pole. So I'd taken to leaving him leant at oblique angles against things, with only the very top touching the wall, and something bracing the bottom. It had been working so far.

Then it fell. Must've slid to the side, then completely lost balance. I came back to my room to find him, still attached to his cross, thankfully, but lying half on the floor, half on the bed. Minus a hand. There was much cursing because I knew it was only a matter of time before one of the hands were broken, they stick out just a bit beyond the cross-beam and have a habit of getting hit on walls and door ways.Walk around your house with your arms stretched out, the same way kids do when they're trying to be airplanes and you'll understand what I mean. Still muttering and just generally pissed off, I take the injured party and move him to a better position. And then I see it.

My container full of my super-secret mache mix (and by super-secret I mean glue + water + hand sanitiser). Empty, a dark patch emanating from the lid, soaking my bed. When I had grabbed the container, I chose it because it used to be full of some sort of fruit in liquid. I assumed it would, therefore, be watertight. Wrong. I spent quite some time trying to soak up all the mix from my various bed things, and then I was stuck with the problem of having no mache mix left, no glue to make more, vines to finish and a hand to reattach.
The best solution seemed to be screaming and/or crying. But I didn't. I cleaned up the mess the best I could, then I made some flour + water mache mix. And I fixed it.

But here's some things I learned:

• Top heavy things will fall over, especially if balanced precariously.

• Just because you think it's water-tight, doesn't mean it is.

• Using flour glue makes you smell like you've been baking.
  

• Tape fixes everything.

• Your time spent over the last holidays playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village wasn't wasted.

"Critical thinking is the key to success." 

(Okay so I didn't really do anything puzzle like. But at the time, remembering I could make glue out of flour and water made me feel like a genius. Shush.)

Innards/Progression

I think it's fairly safe to say that I enjoy taking photos from this perspective. It's pretty cool though, you can see the changes taking place, from the raggedy beginnings to smoothed out edges to the final coat of paint.

Pumpkin Teeth, Eyes & Blood, at Flickr.
(Eyes is my favourite. Just the colours.)

Work In Progress

And only two weeks overdue. I was going to get all of the papier mache on the vines done last night. Was. That was before I discovered a spider inhabiting the support pole under the vine and had a little freak out. It's dead now but I had trouble working to the same efficiency knowing I'd almost touched a spider. Yes, I know, it's a tad girly but it was either a funnel web (very bad) or a house spider (not so bad). There's a nice spider chart here telling you just how hurtie the spiders will be. Don't click on it if spiders freak you out, the pictures, while obviously drawn rather than photographs, move.
But moving away from spiders, once I've got the last of the mache done all that remains is a coat of varnish and then paint. It is shall live! -evil cackle-

-From now on this post will be about mind-numbingly mundane details of my life, so turn back now if you wish. Don't say I didn't warn you.-

Sadly The Gardener is turning into one of those things that I could've had done in a week had I not have had so much else to do. I've probably mentioned this on twitter several times, but the last week in October is for me not only the week before Halloween (and therefore the most exciting), but also the last week for school work submissions for the year (therefore the most nerve-wracking). The logical, "let's get straight A's and go to University" side of me says I should put off everything else and study. The rest of me though, is screaming Halloween. Because I don't really want to go to University, and well, I like Halloween more than I like writing essays about feminism in Ancient Greece, the changing status of artists from the Middle Ages to today, and knowing the formulas on how to find the angles and side lengths of triangles given only one length and one angle.

Ultimately I've chosen to do both. I finished and submitted my math assignment a few days ago. The Gardener is both for Halloween and for school. I got back my mark for my feminism essay last night (I did shockingly well). I spend most nights sewing my costume instead of doing revision and on Wednesday I finished my last compulsory day of sound and lighting tech classes. It's a strange feeling, to be honest. A lot of things have been done, and yet there's still a lot left to do. So I made a list. And another one. And then one more. Then I made a chart of the days leading to Halloween/end of school and filled in when they had to be done. I'm a nerd. I know. These are two of the lists:

Orange note pads make me happy. But the point of this post (there was one, honest) was to ask how the hell you guys do it, those of you who have such large haunts. I have enough trouble with just my modest decor-plans.

Invitations

I like making invitations. I think I've said that a few times before but that's because it's true. I consider them to be pretty important, as they give guests a sneak peak at what the party is going to be like. It's all about expectations.

click to enlarge

This year's Halloween party is set in a haunted house - my own, although we won't tell them that, suspension of belief is important. We decided that all good haunted houses need a backstory, and so the story of ours is thus: Vincent Monroe has lived a long and lonely life. He spent his youth working hard to earn a wage, and when war came he signed up to protect his family, and most importantly, to impress the girl of his dreams, Alice. Shot down in Japan, he escaped capture by the enemy and returned home a little less than he was before. But he knew that Alice would be waiting for him, and the two got happily married. However all good things do not last and she died on his 29th birthday. Vincent became a recluse, spending his time painting and living off his war benefits, until one day he decided to bite the bullet and enter one of his paintings in a competition - the painting of his late wife. He won and soon his paintings sold quicker than he could paint them. With the money he made he bought this large house on the hill, but it's a house too big for just one old man.
One night, neighbours report hearing strange noises and what sounds like crying, loud and painful. They call the police, fearing that their hermit neighbour may be in trouble, and before they arrive they see three figures run out of the house and vanish into the night.

The idea of breaking into a haunted house to have a party isn't a new one, but with a 'actual' newspaper clipping telling the history behind the house, and the painting from the article hanging on the wall, perhaps it will make things a bit more realistic.

So, to the point of this post: How I made it.

Step 1 - writing the article.
The article was written pretty quickly, I opened up a word document and a wikipedia page and figured out what important historical events would have happened to a man born in 1919, in this case WWII. Using the columns tool I made two columns, a thin one on the left and a larger one for the important article on the right. The column on the left is merely to give the impression that is was once part of an actual newspaper page. Too many times I have seen 'torn pieces of newspaper' where you can clearly see that there was only the one article written and it bugs me. But anyway, the left hand column can be filled with an text you like, at most you'll only see a few words. I chose to use the 'first fight' scene from the Fight Club screenplay for mine. Nobody will ever know. While you're at it, open a second word document and fill roughly half a page with the same thing. You'll print this on the back of the page later.
The painting 'Hands' is actually my mother's painting. You can see it in colour here, but I prefer it in black and white, myself. Take the time to play around with picture placements and text size, until it looks like any other newspaper article in the world. I probably spent more time doing that than I did writing the article, which probably shows when you see some quite awful grammatical errors.



Step 2 - Printing and tearing
Once you're happy with everything, it's time to print. Find a thin, slightly discoloured paper to print on. I used some old tractor feed paper which for whatever reason, we still have quite a bit of. Don't forget to turn the paper over to get the text on the back. Once it's finished, smudge it a bit. You never see a clean newspaper and your fake one should be no different. Now it's time to tear the edges. Make it as neat or as messy as you wish, it doesn't matter so long as you keep whatever you consider to be the important information intact.

Step 3 - Scan it and print it again
Get your scanner (or better yet go use a copy machine) and scan your torn and dirty piece of newspaper on top of a clean piece of paper. If you want you can add your text in after scanning it to your computer using something like Photoshop or even MS Paint (like I've done in the first picture), but I and my gang of sweat-shop slaves chose just to right the details out by hand. 'Cause that's what slaves are for. I do prefer the look of the red text but it gave it a more mass-produced feel, which is good if it's going to be a large party, but ours will only be just over double figures so we didn't want it to be too flier like. It's up to you which you choose, really.


When we were giving them out one friend remarked to another, who had never been to a party of mine before, "Don't worry, she goes way over the top with things". I was ever so slightly offended as he said this like it was a bad thing, but then had to stop myself from laughing because my invitations had nothing on some I've seen on the internet. I'd planned on doing a little round-up of my favourites but for some reason by bookmarks folder has lost all its individual folders and it'd take me an hour or so to find them. But they're out there. In the meantime, I've got a corpse to varnish.

The Gardener

I love the moment when you realise what you're going to name a piece. For me it's always a bolt out of the blue thing, one moment completely stuck and then suddenly I've got it.
I don't remember what I was thinking about when the name came to mind. I do, however, remember wondering why the hell I hadn't thought of it before.

(Yeah, guess whose scanner stopped working)
((Also, this sketch was drawn in a very short amount in time and should in no way represent my artistic abilities. ))
(((Although, when it comes to drawing, that is about as good as it gets.)))

A poor soul was working in the garden, and something went a bit awry and now he's a part of the garden. He's THE GARDENER!
Sigh.

I think it's fairly safe to say my brain is not working too good. The Gardener is both for Halloween and my final art piece for the year. And did I mention it's due Friday? I am going more than a little bit insane trying to get everything done, which explains why it's only now that I realise I was meant to write an Idol Worship post today instead. As far as I'm aware blogger doesn't have a save as draft option for posts so you get my frantic rambles today, and Idol Worship tomorrow. And then the day after as well! Yay?

The Gardener is currently about 2/5 of the way done, I'd guess. I've got a pumpkin head made (my first ever), the skeleton torso and arms were cannibalised from my last big artwork/thing, and I'm about halfway through covering them in papier mache. All I've got to do, therefore, is make the cross, buy and mache the rope for the vines, and spray paint the leaves. Then I shove the whole thing in the ground and abandon it.

But right now I'm going to go have a nice long bath and write a fake newspaper article about the death of a fictional artist. Ciao.

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Now playing: Beck - Scarecrow
via FoxyTunes

I Caved

I got a 'Halloween Tree'. I told myself I didn't need one. It was just a thing to take up space and make you buy ornaments to put on it. It was too kitschy and Christmas is for trees.

Yesterday I gave in and headed out and cut myself down a nice creepy looking branch. Skills with a hacksaw, I has them. I ripped off the leaves that had only just started to grow (what with it being spring and all), and clipped off any branches that didn't fit the aesthetic. Then I spray painted the whole thing a nice matte black. As well as my hands and left pant leg. Skills with spraypaint, I do not have.

I decided that if I was going to have a Halloween tree I wasn't going to subject anyone else to my nonsense, and that it was going to go in my room. Right now the branches hang over my bed-head. It's a pretty neat set-up. I couldn't resist taking a photo of it in the hall though. How can you say no to orange and black?


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Now playing: Flyleaf - What's This?
via FoxyTunes

Imitation and That Light Blub Moment

About a month ago Pumkinrot posted about his Witch Jars. Today I finally got around to making two. They're not nearly as impressive thanks largely to my incompetence in judging colours. A cool red plus black equals a deep wine colour. You'd think that seeing as colour theory is taught the first lesson of every art class I've ever taken that I would have learnt this. But apparently not. I choose to blame my being taught lighting colour theory for this mistake. The wine colour is passable for blood, but it irritates me, so I'll probably go and re-do it later on. Pictures will follow.

My friend and I were talking (post witch-jar creation) about what we were going to do about making my built-after-the-year-2000 house look like it was old enough to have a history that didn't involve a building accident. And then it dawned on us that if we just didn't turn any of the lights on, we'd be in with a fighting chance. So we're going to tape over all the light switches, cover everything with dust sheets and use only candles and torches for lighting. If it works in the movies, it'll work for us.
We hope.

Photo from here

Everybody look at the moon!

This week in my family is generally referred to as 'cake week'. Thanks to 3 birthdays within 8 days and everybody wanting to celebrate, there are generally six cakes made, and mostly eaten within the space of a week.

Since I'm first (and therefore best), I decided I wanted to make a special cake. Ended up more like a 'special' cake than a special cake, but I wanted to make a cake like the moon:


Who will be familiar to anyone who's ever watched the Mighty Boosh. If you haven't, go educate yourself. If you have, good. This is what my cake ended up looking like.




It didn't turn out quite how I would have liked, but it is so hard to put eyelashes on a cake, you know?

Work Space

I was taking photos of my latest 'art piece' - a bird made out of, well, a tree - and found someone took a few photos of my making it. Which is really creepy because I don't remember anyone in the shed with me at all on Tuesday. So yeah. This is where I 'work' sometimes, but seeing as there's no internet access or mobile phone signal down there it's not often.

These Shoes Are Made For Ripping Apart And Then Poorly Fixing With A Glue Gun And Scrap Fabric

And that's just what they'll do! Very lame title I know, you'll have to excuse me, it's the end of the holidays, I'll start using my brain again tomorrow. Oh and I apologise for the poor quality of the next two photos, the auto focus kept getting distracted by my shiny blankets.

I love these shoes, but they keep dying on me. I don't go on long walks. I don't jump in puddles (not in these shoes, anyway). I don't kill people with them (again, not these shoes). They just wear out around the seams and the heels really fast for me. And then you can see my socks.

So I decided, hey, I've got a bunch of this red fabric and a glue gun, why not line my shoes with red fabric so it looks like my shoes are full of blood from a distance? Brilliant idea! Well it was until I managed to burn myself with the glue gun. They look pretty cool though.




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Now playing: Final Fantasy VII - One Winged Angel

NA NA NA NA NA NA BATCARD!

I am, obviously, the best friend ever. Okay, not really. But to make up for what I lack, I make awesome birthday cards. And yes, I'm rather full of myself at the moment, but mostly I'm just happy that my idea worked.

I'd never used ink before, and I was fairly sure that the whole thing would fall apart the minute I tried to cut out the oval. But it didn't. And now I've got an idea for the artwork I have to do as part of my 'education'. Bonus.

The inside of the card is yellow, and there's an identical bat on the other side, so you can properly see his wings.
Click to enlarge.


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Now playing: Franz Ferdinand - I'm Your Villain