Creative Sculpture 2

Plaster, hessian, bone and rusty manhole cover:

Chloe Leaper teaching.

Plaster is a good material to learn basic sculpting skills. It is quick to set but soft enough to carve. We used clay as a moulding base and then poured plaster to create the mould. Clay can be imprinted with found objects (stones, peddles, sticks), pre-made objects (kitchen items, pre-made plaster casts) or simply with the hand. The plaster casts can then be worked on with carving tools, rifflers, knives and files or broken and re-joined using plaster as a glue.



Interesting to combine plaster and seaweed!

Creative Sculpture 1

I'm back home and inspired from a Creative Sculpture Course in Porthleven, Cornwall. The course was run by the Art Academy and tutored by Chloe Leaper.

Day one we did blind line drawings out in the harbour - looking at the object but not at the paper. It is amazing how this produces a freer line and trains the mind to harmonize eye and hand. This is also a 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain' type exercise devised to sidestep the brains tendency to think it already knows what an object looks like. This is one of the hardest obstacles for a beginner to overcome - the tendency to draw what we think rather than what we see. It's a kind of visual familiarity breeding contempt. But the nice thing about the pencil basic line is that it can be converted into a wire line. Then the wire line can be modified into a 3D model. The 3D model can then be explored in terms of planes and spaces by filling the negative spaces with paper, sellotape or string etc.



I love the elegance of this exercise and the steps in the process are satisfying.