Blue Skies and Blood

This piece has been in the making for a week straight, not to mention all last symester making the mold for the piece, and casting them, finally geting some finished.

Here is the progression.

To make the mold i had to make a piece out of wet clay to cast the plaster around. I wheel threw a sold cylender and then trimmed it to the specks. I built up around the bottom and up to the center line, put up the walls to hold the plaster, and poured the first half.

Next I fliped the mold and made the other half.

Here is the mold finished on the scale.

As you can see the thing weighs about 85 pounds. EMPTY

Here I'm filling the mold with slip.

Here i fliped it onto a bucket to pour out the mold after it has formed the object.

The mold held about 3 gallons of the skip so the mold was about 115 pounds.

Pieces from the mold. grey is wet, white is dry.

This is the first fire

Now last Thursday I was invited to do a raku fire and i thought these would be most interesting to try, i figured they would all split and fracture, but i did have one come out whole, my intintion was to still glue them back together and create an instillation with them.

First glaze them

Then fire them, sorry no pic of this part, but you use a 55 gal metal drum cut doun and a gas burner to do it.

Then pull out the piece when the glaze is melted and glowing orange, and smother it in a cumbustable material.

Here is what it looked like 

 

Next/ my past 5 days fix them

I used a strong epoxy called PC7 I had to fix 2 totally and strengthen the other 2

While that dryed I put gold leaf on the fins

After reinforcing the pieces i poured even more glue in them to make em even stronger.

 

To be able to mount these things i had to create a mount.

I figured out a 2in washer, 1.5 in X 1/4/20 bolt worked with a few other washers and a nut.

I used the glue above to keep them together then i tightened the bolt and nut.

Now I atatched it to the piece with the epoxy.

Sanded it to shape and

Gold leafed it to match the fins

Now this week I will still finish them with the fins.

I'm excited and can't wait to install them in the show at the Sieghiem

I'll post more on this as it progresses

New Box

On the Left is an image of my coils I extruded. they are 1.5 in thick and around 1.5 ft long, these will be hand rolled to fit the desired width for the project. Image on the right is the idea. I would like to create 2 of these boxes but realize it may take too much space to do them all at ones. It's a rectangle box, 25in tall 25 cm wide. will have a bottom and possibly a lid. will be glazed accordingly.

First i extruded all the coils to save time. Then i slabed out 4 parts and cut the to the size I needed. The next step  I will work on tonight is to start coiling on top of the slabs a pattern of a horizontal split dinomd and vertical coils. I'm going to then slab a base and assemble the 4 sides to this. After that sets up I'm going to create the base. a sq. with dimonds cut out. I'm very excited about this piece. If all goes well I'm going to try and make a second to make a pair. I also played wiht the idea of reversing the coil pattern on the second for contrast. 

As you can see alot of space is required to work on all 4 at once. also another whole table to work the coils to desired thickness.

Here are some images of the work i did last week when the studio was empty, 5:30 pm - 6:30 am.

first I scored all the slabs so i could attatch the coils to make the pattern.

next I rolled out coild from my larg collection thate were extruded beforhand. I rolled a set of medium coils, about 1/4 in thick. then i rolled those out further to about 1/8 in thick.

I put all coild side by side and then cut out my priangle shape.

took the coils apart and attatched each one individually.

did this for all four slabs.

Then i used 3 medium coils vertically on the top, and 3 on the bottom. attatche these the same way.

After I attatched all 24 of these i continued to roll out more medium coils to the smaller size.

this is where i really about lost my mind. this took forever to attatch these onto the rest of the slab. I completed one slab and have to finish the last step on the other 3.