Creating a Relief Sculpture

Both the puppet and the scaling-up task took a lot less time to complete than I'd expected. I also feel a little short-changed in terms of using the workshops available to me; this is why I've decided to give myself an extra project of creating a relief sculpture. The idea comes from an item I saw on display at the Wellcome Collection: 'Anatomical model' [which can be seen 1st in the gallery below]. These kinds of models existed as a key collision of art and science in order to help us better understand our bodies. Although we now know anatomical models to be made from plastic, ivory was an extremely popular choice of material right up until the 19th Century and this is what I'll be attempting to replicate.

Above: Some examples of the kind of relief sculpture I want to create.

My plan is to turn the blueprint illustration into a 3D sculpture, like the ones shown above. Once the sculpture has been made, I'll also be able to practice some painting and ageing techniques too.

Below are a few rough concept drawings along with the referenced blueprint illustration.

I've got 2 weeks until the deadline, which is plenty of time to sculpt, cast and create it. Last week, I briefly mentioned the idea to the casting technician, Martin, and he suggested that I create the sculpture using either plasticine or wax clay. Due to a tight budget, I had to go with plasticine. From attending the casting induction last week, I was shown how to create an armature for sculpting onto to. Using a slab of sealed wood as a base, you can hammer nails into it to mark out the main points of the sculpture. The next stage is to create a sort of armateur using metal wire to connect the nails together. It is from here that you can start applying your chosen modelling material to create a rough shape.

I've divided up the making process into 2 main stages: Creating the plasticine model and then creating the relief sculpture. Below I've documented both over the span of 1 week.

Stage 1: Creating the Plasticine Model

Sculpting this piece was a lot harder than I thought it'd be! Plastacine is a little bit irritating to work with and I found it impossible to smooth the entire thing [especially the stomach area]. I think in future I'll work with wax clay or just ordinary clay.

Stage 2: Creating the Relief Sculpture

Update [05.02.18]: Today I went into the casting workshop to discuss the process of moulding and casting this sculpture. The technician's initial reaction was that this piece was too difficult to recreate at a high accuracy in plaster; it was too small, too fragile and too complex in shape. We began to think up ways to cast the sculpture [without losing too much detail and at an affordable price] and came to a conclusion of using thin layers of silicon. However, just as I'd finished created a clay wall around the sculpture on a slab of wood, the technician had to leave to go to the hospital suddenly. Before he left, he'd said how the casting of this piece was a bit of a gamble anyway and would take at least 4 days to complete. Unfortunately, with no other tutors/technicians to help me out today, I had to abandon the casting idea - there simply wasn't enough time. [Note: I've also fallen quite ill so I need to be think about how much I'm capable of doing in the coming days].

I wanted to at least preserve the sculpture in some way and get some more painting practice in before the hand-in date. It was David Neat's wordpress site that happened to have some useful advice for this situation: applying coats of PVA wood glue which toughens the surface and allows it to be painted.

As you can see below.

My sculpture was then ready to begin painting. I needed to do a bit of research first in order to create an ivory effect and I found a really useful tutorial online. They began by using a scalpel to create lots of small carvings into the sculpture, giving the effect of bone. A base layer was then added to warm the colour in a yellow-ish hue. A darker distress stain was then applied with combinations of lighter layers afterwards to bring down the tone.

It was at this point that I realised the technique I saw online simply wasn't working for my own sculpture. I forgot to do a small experiment before starting on the main piece, so this was my fault! Below you can see a new process that I figured out independently.