Working on the horse

In between sessions with the background, I roughed in the missing throatlatch and shoulder. While the background is permanently attached to the white tile, the horse is worked on a piece of wax paper. I need him loose so I can place him on the background from time to time.

Once the general shapes are all there, I use a photograph to assess the horse. Often flaws that aren't immediately obvious in the clay are quite visible in the photo. In this case, the first thing I noticed is that I have the eye canted at too steep an angle. I'll need to pull the top corner down just a bit. But the bigger problem is that while I was thinking that I'd have the horse's face slightly angled away, so that the nostril is only barely visible, the upper part of the face is too much in profile for that to work properly. I'm not going to get the slightly turned away effect; I'm going to make the muzzle look too small.

This is a problem that's really easy to have with bas relief because the perspective is skewed. Things are not receding in a straight-forward manner. The sculptor manipulates them to emphasize certain things and downplay others. There is more art to getting this right than science. Looking at the photo, though, I could tell that what I had was not going to work unless I brought the muzzle around just a bit.

Although it's hard to see because my default color (lime green) isn't that different from the gray-green of the clay, I've cut and pasted the eye area at a more shallow angle to see if that helps my face. I learned this trick from my friend Carol Williams. Instead of immediately cutting apart her sculptures to make adjustments, she tried the corrections out in PhotoShop first. It is a huge time-saver! If I find I am going down a wrong alley with my proposed solution, at least I haven't mangled my work. And if I'm not worried about "undoing all that work", I can be a lot braver about changes.



I've also added some directional lines to indicate what I might do with his mane. As I've worked more on the background, I've come to realize that I'm going to need some strong visual cues that bring the eye back to the face. That's because the text will naturally draw the eye from the left to the right. I need to pull it back up and to the left, so using movement in the mane is a natural choice.

Here I can take those same lines and use PhotoShop to add them to my design. I think something like this is going to work, but it will mean revising my ideas about border flourishes. For the moment I'm going to leave the simpler border. I'll be better able to assess what needs to happen with that aspect of the design when I'm closer to the end. My suspicion at this point is that any additional ornamentation will be minimal, and will likely go in the top right corner.

But aside from some tweaking here and there, this is probably the general design.



Here is my background again, minus the horse. I've textured the square behind the horse with a grooved loop. (The tool is actually made from an old guitar string.) It's a barely-there texture, but it will be enough to catch some of the glaze and give the area a little bit of interest.



You can also see the blue border has returned. I have to share my secret for getting pristine border edges on medallions. The blue material is "wax wire". It comes in various thicknesses and bevel styles. The border here is a 12 guage half-round. The wax is soft enough to bend into curves, which is what was done at the corners. I filled the miters with NSP Soft, which is why there are green areas.



I also used the time in between working on the horse to get a smooth, uniform bevel along the outside of the card. This doesn't have to be perfect since I'll sand the edges of each casting, but the closer it is the less time I'll have to spend with each casting.

The horse and background at both getting close to done at this point. In this photo the face is done except for some smoothing of the ear, the area behind the eye and the front of the nostril.



The smoothing is done with a soft brush and some Goo-Gone, which works as a solvent for the Chavant clays. I find this part tricky because I gravitate towards a softer, smoother style. I suppose years of painting Maureen Love sculptures has had an effect on me! But I've also learned that heavy-handed smoothing can take away the lifelike quality of a piece.



Here I have the face mostly where I want it. Normally I would not finish out one area to this high level while another (in this case, the shoulder) is still really rough. The chances of damaging the one while I work the other is pretty high. But things that had been eluding me about sculpting faces were beginning to click, and I found myself unwilling to set the face aside. Hopefully I won't do anything clumsy while finishing the shoulders, or else I might find out just how well I learned those things about faces!



I'm also almost caught up with where the sculpture is at in real time, so there might be a day or two between posts. But soon I'll be merging the two - background and horse - together!