Cow Head Progress

I got my mold completely finished and tested for my second round of larger cow heads. (larger than faux bovinae and meant to replace that piece)

The mold is made of Smooth On "Stroke" brush on silicone. The mother mold is plastipaste in three parts. I started this piece before the summer and finally got around to finishing the mother mold. It holds together fairly well. I was able to test the mold today using a decent amount of Smooth-On Smooth Cast 300 White Urethane Resin.  I made the mistake of trying to add more resin to the piece once the original resin had cured and got a bit of overlap. I went over the overlap with a rotary tool and was able to do some touch ups to get the piece closer to normal again.

I plan to cast a few wax ones Thursday and Friday for a melting piece. I might paint the resin one for fun and mount it as well.

First layer or two of brush on silicone

two of the three part mother mold

finishing the mother mold

Inside out cow head. The is the view inside the silicone mold

Resin next to clay

some demel work started

Resin Cow. Moo.

From Another Angle. My hand in there for size. Some Dremel work started.
Still a bit dirty from in the mold. Once touch ups are done it will be primed
and painted.

Summer Sculpture fun

Here is a progress dump of sculpture stuff from the end of the semester and into the summer.

Here is the cow head in oil clay. I showed this one in an earlier post.
It is larger than my previous cow heads and is meant to replace them.

With Brush on Silicone

Beginnings of mother mold. it will be 3 parts

Home made Chevant melting box so that I dont have to buy a
toaster oven. I am starting to work with hard chevant clay.

Melted Chevant on a screw

Bald mini chevant head on a screw

Looking like Sir Patric Stewart.  I think I will keep working
on him as such. Just practicing detail with the chevant on a
small scale.. no real plans for this.

Random shelf in my studio

Small clay model for my large foam dog I was working on.
It's raining foam!!- I want to continue with this project but it
is so messy!

 

Yep. Those are the highlights. Pretty simple. I have been doing more painting than sculpting this summer but I am playing with the chevant and finishing up the new cow heads.

Early April progress dump

Now that the show is finished I have been working on a few pieces to finish up the semester. I have two pieces going in sculpture right now. One is a life size dog that I am carving out of foam (photos to come later) and the other is a new miniature cow head to replace the cow heads in Faux Bovinae that I sold. The mold for that piece got ruined and so I decided to sculpt a new similar one out of clay and make a new mold. I also decided to make the piece a little bigger. This one is probably 150% to 200% as big.

I am still in the clay sculpting part.. smoothing lines and bumps getting the shapes how I want them.

I plan to finish sculpting them this week and make the mold as soon as my new silicone is delivered.

After a few mins (32"x34")

As for oil I have started working on another close up of a drooling cow. It is in very rough stages but I took photographs to kind of show my process for my underpainting.

It doesnt look like much now but after I spend a few hours on it and add some color layers it should start to look like a drooling cow nose. Haha

After about an hour (32"x34")

I also wanted to share that I got portions of a paper I wrote published on the Oklahoma State Museum of Arts blog. It isn't the entire paper but rather selections from it. I researched Pablo Picasso's Toros en Vallauris. Check it out here.

I also recently got written about by Her magazine for Oklahoma state as one of the campus celebrities. Which is kind of fun. Check that article out Here.
 



We also went to Kansas City as an art department a few weeks back. I would like to upload some photos from that trip on here later possibly. It was very fun. We visited a lot of museums and galleries in the area.

Thanks for reading. I plan to post more photographs of progress and the trip very soon.

Momentum

Momentum is this weekend!

Cows and melty things

It's been a while since I posted so I thought I would come on here and share what I am doing.
For sculpture I am working on two sculptures at once so that I am never waiting around for something. I have a foam dog which I will post about when it is a little farther along. I also have these miniature cow heads.

The cow heads were sculpted out of oil based clay. I then made a mold box out of some foam core board. I poured a rubber mold around the clay cow head and let it set up overnight. Now I am casting wax mini cow heads. The plan is to do five or so white ones and also try doing a few colored ones just to see how they turn out.  Whichever turns out better I will use those five for my show.

I will take the five cow heads and mount them to a pedestal and melt them to various stages so that there is a progression from not melted to almost fully melted. The pedestal plus the melted cows will then be shown together.

Clay Cow Head (5-6"?)

In the mold box

pouring the rubber

finished mold with hot wax inside

Three wax cow heads

 I am also doing some miniature paintings for the miniature art gallery I am helping curate for the Oklahoma State University Artists Society. I don't know if these will be in it or not but it is fun to paint this small. These paintings are only a few inches big. I am finding it kind of hard to paint that small with my current brushes. The paint globs on thicker and doesnt dry very fast so it is actually more challenging than I expected for something so small. I like working bigger much better I think.

Early on.. to show size and progress

This is probably bigger on your screen than in real life. This is after a couple

of hours

And last but not least my ceramic cow head got into Momentum :) Momentum will be in Oklahoma City March 7 and 8th 8pm to midnight. :)

http://www.ovac-ok.org/events/events_momentum.cfm

Ceramic Calf/Cow head- Got into Momentum OKC 2014

Ceramic cow. Wax heads

Posting some progress pictures. Got my ceramic cow head back from the kiln.
It turned out differently than I expected. I will post before and after pictures here.
Also got another wax head poured and started to fill in the gaps on my other one.

This is before it went in the kiln. The way I painted on the glaze

Another before shot

After.... The glaze did what it wanted I guess? I kind of like the color but I dont claim to understand how or why.
This is white slip sprayed on with gold plum brushed on in the gas kiln.  It turned out interesting/

I only glazed the mouth and tongue white from what I can ramamber so interesting that it got color. I kind of like it.

The right side of the cows head (left for you if looking straight on) got a lot of weird color variation. Almost a grey/green color.. I am thinking it is just how the glaze ran over the slip but I have no idea really.

Hole in the back. Original thinking was it could hang on a wall. Could also plug it with some wax or something and use it for a vase. haha

COW NOSE!!

from above

another angle

from below

Another angle

I kind of like how shiny it is.

moo.

I cast another under head (core) in plaster so that I could do a second wax head.

Plaster under head after I sanded it and cleaned it up a bit

Sealed it with denatured alcohol and shellac.

after a coat or two of shellac

'

I cut myself a piece of wax to fit for an eyelid on my first wax casting.

After attaching. It still needs some cleaning up but it has its eyelid now at least

I started to patch up the empty spot on the neck. The wax is white when hot. I am hoping it will yellow up to match the rest of the head after a day or so.

A second wax casting of the head. This one over the plaster head core.

Two wax heads and one clay head

Here are the three creepy heads together. Front head is new wax. Right head is old wax (yellows overnight) on top of aluminum and the left is the original clay head.