Carving my way Through Hell

Perhaps the most difficult project I tackled during the Beginning Sculpture class last fall was carving. As I like to tell anyone who will listen (and even those who don't), I am a CREATOR and not a DESTROYER. That is to say, carving is an activity commonly enjoyed by those individuals who occupy the outer ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell.

The assignment sounded simple: carve something out of a solid something else. The instructor provided plaster, and since I had paid a $15 materials fee and plaster was only one of two materials to be provided all semester, I wanted to get my damned money's worth and use some plaster! Plaster, for you lucky uninitiated, starts out as a white powder and hardens once mixed with water. It will take on whatever shape it's poured into (a process called "molding"). I had very little experience with carving, and decided I would create something that was non-representational so it wouldn't have to be recognizable as something else. Using a rectangular box as a mold, I was going to carve out three long, curving tendrils (think, aloe vera leaves) that point up, attached to a square base. After 2.5 weeks of class time (~6 hours a week, so a total of nearly 15 hours), I was no where near done, and the project was due during the next class. So I made three new molds of three different sized plastic food storage bins, and frantically tried to figure out something to carve.

I settled on three stylized birds of different sizes. The littlest is my favourite. Click here for more equally crappy photos of them.

The problem was that when I mixed the plaster and water, I used WAY too much water, and even after it was set, the plaster was too wet to really work with. So I baked the three molds at 250 degrees for something like 5 hours. That dried them out VERY nicely. So nicely, in fact, that the slightest brushing a finger would mar the surface. Which make carving even more difficult, and made preserving them nearly impossible. I tried using a water-soluble varnish on them, and besides turning them yellow, it's flaking off like crazy. I think when the weathers a bit more predictable (and I'm motivated to do so), I'll use a white spray paint on them and hope I can get it thick enough that it'll stick.