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.