Well, while Sarah has been exploring Paris, I’ve been taking art classes! This summer I am doing a series of 5-week intro courses, two in drawing, one in sculpting, and one in painting. My sculpture class just finished up today, and before I forget everything I learned and my sculpture falls over and shatters into a disaster of clay-dust, here is a little bit about what I took away from the experience. I’d never done anything with clay before (the closest I’d come were adventures in the land in the play-doh). And I made some discoveries.
1) Clay is squishy.
Can I just talk about how wonderful it is for a minute? It’s just so perfectly earthy and solid and yet malleable and smooth. In fact, if anything could ever make me more comfortable with the word “moist,” it’s clay. But now that you’re uncomfortable, I’ll move on.
2) Sculpture doesn’t lie.
Well it probably does. Historically, people do like their sculptures to go a little beyond reality.
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| For reference, Brad Pitt would barely reach the top of that tree stump at the bottom. |
But when you’re sculpting, one mistake is going to show up in 3 dimensions, not just 2. This means all sorts of complicated things. But basically, all possibility of fudging your shapes and angles goes out the window. You can’t make the model’s shoulders too broad, because then you’ll also have to make them bigger from every other angle, and all of a sudden the smallish 20-something woman has turned green before your eyes and is the Incredible Hulk…
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| Yikes. This is no good. |
See? When you’ve got 3 dimensions to work with, your mistakes become apparent incredibly quickly. Actually, I like this. When I’m wrong, I’m wrong, and I want to know it as quickly as possible. Assuming I know how to fix it, of course.
3) Sculpting takes forever.
I don’t do much of anything quickly, whether I’m eating a sandwich, writing a blog post, or finishing an art project. Even if I’m being incredibly productive, I will spend at least an hour on a drawing the size of a sheet of toilet paper. But, making a sculpture is like doing 360 drawings. When you’re drawing you can agonize over every single angle and shape, but you only have to do it once. Move around your sculpture 1 degree to the left and bam! there’s a whole new image to be perfected.
After 15 hours of sculpting class, my piece is still a disaster of lumps and bumps and deformities. Take my 6 hour per drawing average, multiply it by 360 for this added dimension… So, give me about 2,160 hours and maybe then I will have something else to show you.
For now, here’s what you all have been waiting for…
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| Take a step back. It really was a pretty pose. |
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| Last but not least...my personal favorite angle |
