Yes!  Just had a fantastic weekend.  Incredibly productive.  I worked til 5am both Friday and Saturday nights and hit a huge milestone.  After a little over two months on the project so far, I finally finished the legs! 

That not only means that I get to move on to her torso now, but also that I no longer have to kneel on the floor all night to work.  My knees are thrilled!  I even added a few feet of pipe to my speed rail rig tonight, raising it to make room for the next round of wires.

I spent the rest of tonight shaping the hips.  Haven't quite found the lines yet, but I'm close.  So far, the two thick wires from each leg have been confined to only interacting with each other as they moved up the leg.  Now they split off from the hip, and one from each leg meets in back to make her spine, and the other two move to the front to make her ribcage and meet at her sternum.  Not sure how far I'll get with those this week.  I have a lot to do to get ready for Christmas this weekend, but then I have most of the next week off, so I'm ready to really throw myself into it.  Super excited.

On the downside, I peeled back a considerable amount of my thumbnail tonight.  I was using channel locks to bend the hips and it slipped off the wire and smashed into my thumb at just the right angle to tear back about a quarter of the fingernail.  Ugh.  Thankfully it's holding steady at a dull, quiet thud right now, but I have a bad feeling that's not going to last for long.  Bummer.

Oh well.  

And the obvious music selection for this post...  She's got legs.

Hey there.  Been a while since I've posted.  I went to visit my folks for a week over Thanksgiving, and have been working feverishly on the piece since I got back.  I've made some serious progress so I figured it's time to take a moment and get caught up on here. 

When I left town, I had the right leg done from the knee down, and had been working on the foot and the shin of the left leg.  My plan was to jump back into the second leg when I got back, to try to even it out with the first leg.  I made the knee and did a few touch ups effectively finishing the shin, but when I moved around to do the calf, I realized that given the angle of this leg, it would probably be best at this point to secure the legs.  That meant committing to the point where the two thick wires from each leg would next meet, the hips, and then joining the two legs together at the crotch. 

This left me at an awkward spot.  With the groin in place at the top of the unfinished legs and nothing else around it, it's pretty exposed.  As the rest of the body builds up around it, it won't be as visible, but right now... yeah, it's pretty exposed.  For the first few days, any time anyone walked in, it was the first thing they noticed, then they'd sort of look at me with one eye squinted, like I was some sort of degenerate.  It was pretty uncomfortable, but now I just ignore them.  It'll be fine once I start working on the torso and fill in some of the space around it.

Now that the legs are shaped and secure, it's considerably less chaotic without the wires splayed in every direction.  There's an added dimension to it as well, and it's officially one piece now, rather than two separate pieces! 

Rather than jumping back into the second leg, I decided to finish the first leg completely.  I started working on the front of the thigh first, and after a few nights, had almost finished it, when I realized that something had gone terribly awry.  The lines of this section were supposed to follow the muscle, but instead looked like she had gills on her leg.  Not that having leg gills wouldn't be cool, but it's not at all what I was shooting for.  It's always a bummer to have to pull out the saw and undo even one night's work, let alone a few, but when you know something's not right, unless you want to spend eternity looking at the piece and only seeing the part you don't like, you have to just butch up and hack it off.  So after three or four days of working on that section, I cut the entire thing out, ground down all the leftover wire stubs, and started over.  This time it totally clicked and looked a thousand times better. 

Once that was finished, I then moved around to the back and started working on the back of her thigh.  When I reached the top of the leg, I had to make an end point, so I added the line of the underside of her bum.  I also screwed up a small area of the back of her knee, so I had to cut a few small pieces out and redo that as well, but that went pretty smoothly, and as of this afternoon, not only is the first leg done, it now looks great.

I still had a few more hours left in the day, so I committed to the second hip and started working on the front of the second thigh.  There's enough of it done now that you can really get an idea of how the finished piece is going to look.  I'm thrilled with it so far.  Crossing my fingers that I can keep this up.

I took a three day weekend from my day job this weekend, as Friday was the ten year anniversary of my first night sculpting.  I made a special playlist for the day with 12 of the cds I was listening to on repeat those first few magical months.  I hadn't heard some of those songs in ages.  I miss those warm gooey sounds of the early 00's downtempo, and they were a perfect soundtrack for my weekend.

 

Alex Gopher's The Child.  One of the first electronica songs I ever got into.  So good.

 

Soft Music Under the Stars.  The first Fila Brazillia song I ever heard and probably still my favorite.  I love the sitar, and this song is so dreamy, and appropriately titled.

  

Manana, by Cristophe Goze.  More sitar.  This was the song I would use to introduce people to the purple seahorse the first time they came by the warehouse I was working in.

And Uschi's Groove, by the Ballistic Brothers.  So many great memories to this song.

So many more I'd love to add here, but I think four is enough for now.  It was a great trip down memory lane though, listening to all those albums back to back.  Definitely good fuel for the work at hand.

Stay tuned for the next update!

Made some decent progress on the leg this past week.  Not as much as I'd have liked to, but more than I thought I would.  Struggled a little with the two thicker wires, trying to match the lines of the first leg.  I'm usually pretty good with symmetry, but mirroring the legs has been challenging.  I think I've got it though.  Working my way through and it keeps looking cooler and cooler with every wire I lay in.  A few more lines to the shin, then it's on to the calf!  Loving it so far.

Nothing too exciting to report.  Been working on the second foot/leg.  It's starting to take shape though, and it's looking good.  I bent the thick wires from the Achilles through the calf tonight.  The angle of this leg leaves the wires sticking straight out, rather than up like the other leg, so I had to build a second, smaller rig to catch those wires.  I now have twelve loose wires swinging around.  It's going to start getting crazy when I get up to the thighs and all those wires are so close together.  I'm going to need to sharpen up my weaving skills.

Well, after taking a few days off to let my eye heal, I finally got back to work last night.  The eye is still scratchy, and what worries me more, it's still a little blurry, but much better than it was Monday, Tuesday and even Wednesday.  I went in for a follow up on Thursday and I have to go back one more time next week, but overall, it's looking pretty good.  Hopefully this scratchiness and blurriness will go away soon.  I'm pretty sure the scratchiness will, but I really hope the blurriness does too.

I started working on the second foot last night.  I had already bent the toes when I did the first foot, to be sure to keep them the same size, so last night I shaped the rest of the footprint, attached it to the base, started building up the toes and started the toenails.  As I said before, she is standing on her toes and taking a step forward.  The first leg, her right leg, is the one directly under the body, supporting her weight on the ball of the foot.  The left leg, the one I started last night, is a step behind her.  It's really just touching the base with her toes and the foot is more perpendicular to the floor. 

So that's it.  Everything that's going to be making contact with the base, the support for the whole sculpture, is now there.  The first foot isn't as sturdy as I'd like it to be, but I think it's more than strong enough to support everything, and the second foot is really just sort of picking off the piece, so it only really needs that small point where the toes touch the ground.  This was one of my main concerns going into it, but now that those points are finished, I think it's going to work. 

Just adding that first little bit of the second foot has changed the piece completely.  It takes it from being this abstract... thing... a leg sticking up from the ground and unraveling into nothingness, and suddenly gives it context.  All it is is a footprint, but suddenly I can see the other leg.  It's pretty crazy. 

Great soundtrack all night last night, but when it started raining around 1AM, the cellos came out and everything sort of fell into place.  Nice moody end to the evening.  Johann Johannsson came out with the first raindrops, and then I finished the night with Olafur Arnalds.  Soooo good.

Well, in a bit of a holding pattern here.  You know how I've been saying I've been doing so much grinding?  Woke up to an itchy eye on Monday.  I assumed it was because I only got a few hours of sleep on Sunday night, but by Monday night, it was getting red, scratchy and watering.  I put some Visine in right before I went to bed and it felt like it made it worse.  Woke up this morning and my eye was dark red, puffy, really scratchy and incredibly light sensitive.  Even just turning on my phone in my dark room, with my bad eye covered, was enough light in my good eye to make it feel like someone was digging their thumb into the bad eye.  Weird.  Went to the eye doctor and it turned out there was a piece of metal in my eye that had already started to rust.  The doc gave me some numbing eye drops, then took a needle and first scraped off the piece of metal, and then scraped off the rust ring on my eyeball.  He said it would most likely scar, but thankfully it wasn't on my pupil, so it shouldn't affect my vision.  He gave me a few more numbing drops so I could make it home before it got scratchy again, which it did a few hours later.  So now it should be red, scratchy and watering for a few days, then should start getting better.  Still light sensitive, so I can't do any welding for a few days.  Bummer.  But I guess it could have been a lot worse.  So, time to move from safety glasses to safety goggles.  Lesson learned.

Had a fantastic week and made some really good progress.  Still need to do a few touch ups here and there, but for all intents and purposes, I finished the lower leg and began the thigh.

Looking a few steps ahead, I think I've hit the point where I need to take a pause on this leg and begin the next one.  The wires moving up through the thigh are going to continue on to the torso, so I really need the other leg at this point, so I can figure out how it will all come together.  Very exciting on one hand, a little daunting on the other, as this leg took me almost a month.  Hopefully the next one will go a little quicker.  I'm not holding my breath though.  This one didn't go so slow because I didn't know what I was doing, rather it's just time consuming work, especially since I have to do the finish work as I go.  But it looks good.  I got the shape I was going for, the design is looking cool and I'm incredibly happy with it so far.

The speed rail rig I made is finally starting to get some real use.  It had only been holding the two thick wires for the first few weeks, but that was because all the other wires were ending at the knee.  Once I got past the knee and moved back to the calf and started the thigh, the new wires I've been adding don't have a stopping point.  They're going to continue on up through the body.  So at this point, it's now holding eight loose wires, with many more to come.  It's gonna start getting tricky to move them around when I need to.  It's almost like weaving.

Time change happened this weekend.  Bye bye, daylight savings.  I'll see you in four months.  =(   It was also cold and a little rainy.  This part of the year always beats me down a little.  I hate that it gets dark an hour and a half before I get off from my day job.  Weekends take a hit too.  I'm a creature of the night, it's my most productive time, but then I sleep til after noon on Saturday and Sunday, and now it will get dark a few hours after I wake up on the weekends.  I really don't do well with the cold weather either.  I think I'm part lizard.  I could take 90 degrees year round.  It'll be interesting to see how this all affects me during this project.  Fortunately, my life is looking pretty good these days, so I'm starting off on a good foot.  =) 

Dug deep into the Cure's album Disintegration a number of times this weekend.  Maybe it was the weather.  Over twenty years after its release, Disintegration is still one of my favorite albums of all time.  It's perfect.  Flawless.  And it was the perfect work mood for me this weekend.

Good weekend.  My attention got pulled in a few other directions today, but I got a lot done Friday and Saturday.  I committed to the lines the thigh, and finished the shin, minus a few welds that still need to be ground down.  It's looking good.  The knee is next.

I played that Phutureprimitive song a lot this weekend, but overall, my soundtrack this weekend was all about soft.  I revisited Kaki King, and realized how much I've missed her.

No pictures today, but I made pretty good progress this past week.  Not as much as I'd have liked, but that's par for the course.  I'll probably say that a few hundred times before I finish. 

I stalled for a few nights while I sought out the lines in the leg.  If you'll remember, there were two thicker wires that I started out with, making the arch and outer edge of the foot, meeting back at the Achilles tendon.  Those two wires, and the eventual matching pair from the other leg, will twist and turn their way through the whole body, following the main contours of her form.  From the Achilles tendon, they worked their way up creating the lines of the calf.  That was where I temporarily got stuck, finding their transition into the thigh.  There are so many great muscle lines in the thigh, it was hard deciding which ones to follow, and how they'd then transition into the the next section of the body.  They will eventually work their way through the thigh, the hips, stomach and spine and out through the arms.  I need to think a few sections ahead with these wires, because how and where those lines move into the next section determine how everything else will then fill in the current section.  I found the lines in the thigh though, and am now filling in the shin and calf.  I'll try to post some pictures later this weekend.

This song got me through a few nights this week.

It's been a really productive week since I last posted.  I actually finished the foot and the ankle over the weekend.  As it began filling out, it really took on a nice shape.  Finding and following the lines has been fairly easy so far.  Alas, wire work like this doesn't really photograph well.  The camera sort of flattens it and you lose that third dimension in a lot of the curves.  Especially if you're looking at two layers over each other.  I can see that's going to be a problem for this blog.  I get all excited over a night's work and then when I look at the photos, they're pretty unflattering.  At least some turn out alright.

I started working on the calf and shin tonight.  It's looking good.  I'm realizing it's going to be pretty slow going though, a little more so than usual, but it's worth all the time when the lines finally show themselves and the curves emerge. 

So it looks like this week will be all about the lower leg.  Hoping to make it to the knee by this weekend.  We'll see.

Song of the day:  Escape Velocity by The Chemical Brothers.  I couldn't stop playing this song over and over this weekend.  I just love how it builds and builds and then just explodes... and then keeps on going.  Chemical Brothers are good at that.  Seems to be a gimmick of theirs.  Anyway, this is from their latest album, which I didn't even know existed til last week.  Loving me some Spotify.

Wow, great weekend.  Had a lot on my plate during the week, so I didn't get much done, but I dove into it Friday night and made up for it these last few days.

As I said in my last post, I used the thicker wire for the underside of the foot.  I then added one more length of the thicker wire on each side, creating the arch on the inside and the edge of the outside, meeting back at the Achilles tendon.  These will soon turn into the calf, running up to the back of the knee.  Turns out, this should be the last of the thick wire I'll need for the feet.  By the time they met at the heel, the base of the foot was pretty strong.  I think if I use the 1/8th for the rest of the foot, it should strengthen up enough to hold up the piece.  Especially with some of the weight distributed back on the second leg.  So that's great.  The 3/16th is just so clunky looking for something like this.  I'm definitely going to try to use as little of it as possible on the rest of the piece.

On the other end of the spectrum, when I started working on the toes, I decided to use some of the thinner wire, specifically the .078, and realized that all three of the thinner gauges I got are sprung steel, not mild steel, which means they don't really like to bend.  I may have to see if I can find some thin mild steel somewhere or else just figure out how to finesse this stuff.  In the end, it did, with a fair amount of effort and a little swearing, work nicely though. 

When steel gets hot, its surface oxidizes, changing its color, so for every single weld, I not only grind down the weld itself, but also up to an inch on each side of the weld to get it back to its intended shiny and textured surface.  It's tedious, but it's looking really good.  Lots of grinding though.  Hopefully it'll ease up a bit after I get out of the small, cramped curves of the toes.

So, standing here at the tail end of the weekend, I have a foot and five toes well on their way.  A friend once described my sculpting as pulling magical creatures out of one plane of existence, my imagination, into this physical, tangible plane of existence.  I always liked that description.  By that line of thinking, my next sculpture has literally dipped her toes into the physical realm.  Exciting times.

One more thing... If you know me at all, you know of my disdain for television and my deep love of music.  Music is such a huge part of my process when I'm sculpting.  The energy it creates moves through me, physically and emotionally, and then comes out in the wire.  It sounds a little hoaky when I try to put it in words like that, but if you know what I mean, then you know what I mean.  So given that, I've decided to start posting an occasional song or two that happened to get me in my groove while I was working that day.  Here are the first two from this weekend.

Groove Armada's Chicago.  An oldie.  This song never fails to up the volume on my stereo and transport my brain to the playa.  Good song to work to.



And Cryogenic Dreams by Phutureprimitive, a song I just got turned onto and couldn't stop listening to this weekend.

Good night tonight.  I finally started bending wire!  I actually did quite a bit tonight, but didn't really make a lot of progress.  I began the eve grinding some of the wire, started bending one of the feet, and then realized that my steel plates were too small so I had to replace them with larger ones.  That slowed me down a bit.  It felt really good to start bending though.

I usually only use two sizes of wire: 3/16th for the more structural stuff and 1/8th for the more detailed stuff.  I decided to add some thinner gauge to the mix this time around, since there are going to be so many subtleties and smaller details throughout the body.  I picked up three other thicknesses.  I'm starting with about 50 ten foot lengths of 3/16ths, 50 twelve foot lengths of 1/8th, 20 three ft. lengths of 3/32nds, 25 three foot lengths of .078 and 15 three foot lengths of .055.  It'll be interesting to see what the thinner wire does when I start welding it. 

I was using the 3/16ths tonight to make the point of contact for the front (right) foot, from the toes to the ball of the foot.  It was a lot of tight curves for wire that thick, so I used my torch.  Usually don't get to use it that much because it's really overkill for anything other than just that... tight curves with the thickest wire.  I'm going to try to use as little of the 3/16ths as possible because I want the piece to be more delicate, but one of the challenges I'm going to be facing is that she's standing on her toes, so the whole thing is going to be supported by a pretty small footprint with no internal structure.  I'm going to have to use a fair amount of the thicker wire on her feet just to support the whole thing. I'm definitely going to need the structural integrity of the thicker wire throughout the whole piece, but hopefully I'll be able to ease off of it as I move my way up the body.

Soooooo... hey there.  Welcome to my very first blog.  I'm starting a new sculpture and I thought it might be a good exercise for me to record the process, start to finish, and in that, maybe someone out there would find it interesting too.  I would, though, like to start by saying that I'm a sculptor, not a writer, so bear with me here.  Hopefully this won't be a train wreck.  We'll see.

I'd assume anyone reading this probably found the link on my webpage or my Sandman Creations facebook page, but for anyone who doesn't know my work, I create wire sculptures, usually filled with lights and covered with fabric.  This way, the wire work is backlit through the fabric.  I break out of that box from time to time and do some other stuff, like playing with shadows or incorporating other materials into the pieces, but it pretty much all revolves around steel wire.  For me, working with wire is all about curves.  I am forever on a quest to find the perfect curve.

This new project has been bouncing around in my head for about 5 1/2 years now... twisting and turning, expanding and contracting, morphing and evolving.  It's a nude figure, all wire, with no lights or fabric.  As for the pose, it's been a long arc.  It started as a spritely young woman, hands on her bent knees with a beautiful pair of wings stretching out behind her.  Over the years, it eventually transformed into a more moody and dramatic pose of a woman (sans wings) having just woken up, luxuriously stretching as she takes a step forward on her toes.  Graceful, gentle, languid, and sensual.  I guess the closest thing I can relate it to would be some of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the mid to late 1800s.  Two in particular were a huge inspiration to me.  Flaming June by Lord Frederic Leighton completely captured the feel and mood I wanted, as did Midsummer Eve by Edward Robert Hughes, which was also what the original fairy pose was somewhat based on. But the most important thing was the mood of those paintings.  That's what I wanted.  Whether I can translate any of this into wire... well, that remains to be seen. 

I came up with this idea while I was working on another of my sculptures, a giant sea dragon, back in 2006.  Unfortunately, at the time, my welding wasn't clean enough to do something this exposed the way I wanted to.  I've spent the time since dialing my welding in, as I made dragons, butterflies, octopi, assorted aquatic beasties and giant shadow casting mandalas.  I finally reached a point earlier this year where I realized I was ready.  When it hit me, it was actually a fairly scary moment because that meant it was time for action.  Now I had to do it.  But that's how I felt when I was beginning all of my large pieces and I've learned that being almost as terrified as I am excited is the perfect place for me to be when starting a new project. 

Over the next several weeks, I locked in the pose, built a giant lazy suzan so I could take 360 degree photos of my subject, and hired a model.  The photos have now been taken, materials have been purchased and my work area organized.

And here I am.

I started this weekend, working on the base. My friend Jovin had given me an interestingly shaped wooden stand about a year ago, knowing I'd find a good use for it in some upcoming sculpture.  He's the same person that gave me a 1956 Oldsmobile car door, which I immediately wrapped a giant octopus around.  He's got a good eye and a great aesthetic.  As I started moving forward with the design of this piece, I realized that this stand would make a perfect base.

I'm not sure exactly how much this sculpture is going to weigh, but I know I'm going to end up using a fair amount of steel, so I decided to weigh the box down a bit.  I cut open the bottom and added some really thick walled 2 in. by 3 in. box tube. 

Next I attached two steel plates on the top where her toes would be making contact with the base.  The base will eventually be covered in fabric, the only fabric on the piece.  Something mossy.   

The night's work wasn't too exciting, but it felt really good to actually be making progress on this, after 5 1/2 years of anticipation.

I was out most of the day yesterday, but last night I did a little more prep work with the photos and set up a speedrail stand to catch the wire as I'm working.  Since I'll be starting down at the feet, and using 10 and 12 foot lengths of wire, when I begin working my way up I'm going to have a lot of extra wire flopping around.  Now I'll be able to clamp it on to the speedrail. 

So I guess I'm almost ready to go.  Today I'll start prepping some of the wire by grinding it down a bit with my Dremel.  It's a bit tedious and time consuming, but I like the texture and shininess that gives it.  After that and a little more studying of the photos, that's pretty much it.  I'll be ready to start bending wire.  Wow.

Standing back and looking at my shop, all set up and ready to go, with stacks of wire and my tools at the ready, put me in a really great mood last night.  I have butterflies in my stomach, and that "night before vacation" feeling in my chest.  It's been so long since I've felt this.  It's pretty great.

Well, I guess that's all for now.  I hope to post photos and updates pretty regularly.  I'm guessing this is going to take me about 4 to 6 months.  Probably closer to six.  Really tough to say at this point. 

Alright, talk to you soon.