In my minds eye, I saw these fat little birds landing on a line held by two girls. I knew I had a fun idea to create from. I called them Potato Birds because of their shape and imagined all sorts of situations they might put themselves in. I created names for them male and female, old and young.

It led to this, my second sculpture of 2020.

Still pretty light on tools for carving my discovered marble I am sculpting with clay. After the Natarajasana in oil clay, or Plasticine as it says on the wrapper, I tried something with more permanence called Sculpey. After much reading I got three different types of it to try.

I learned some lessons you might benefit from.

Tools: this is good clay but it doesn’t get along with shaping tools made of aluminum. They leave smudges and stains. My alternatives are the wax sculpting tools that are smooth and small enough to allow detail.

Baking: the instructions say keep the clay thickness not very thick but even. 275 degrees F 15 minutes per quarter of an inch. I under cooked it repeatedly. Or maybe I over cooked it. Maybe I had too many mixed thicknesses.  I paid with cracked clay.

I like this clay however and am making another composition with it currently.

When I got the idea I didn’t realize it was for sculpture, having not attempted any since the late 1970’s when I did a lost wax casting of a jaguar cart, a wooden wallet, and a feelie. As soon as I had some clay, I knew how to apply the concept.

In the end, my treatment of cracking was to paint over the clay with verathane.  Then I embedded holographic glitter. My attempt to paint color onto the figures was not satisfying and I had to do one of them over from scratch.

I did some repairs with good results. These were facilitated by sculpey oven bake glue. Good stuff.

Highly recommended.

T

This is the idea as it came to me. I added the cats early on and then for simplicity left out the one pouncing on a tail and eliminated the alighting bird this time around. With the idea on paper, I  asked Leah and she agreed to pose for the figures. Then I designed them from further, still not realizing they were for sculpture.

Before I committed the idea to the clay, I did a fresh photo shoot with Leah where she did the two poses in the street and I photographed her from all around.

Because Leah had posed the figures individually, certain dynamics were not accounted for. Plus, I was having a hard time with face expressions.

Larissa and Kayla stopped by and helped me work those out.