Quick Update

Heya Peeps!

I thought I would quickly post up a few pictures of the school project that I am working on, since I was working on the presentation boards for it at the moment.  First we we tasked with finding "inspirational pictures" that we wanted to draw from.  These could literally be anything (one of mine was a picture from Brave).  But my favorite one was my family drawn from fire:

This is actually the second generation picture, I don't have a picture of the first with me.  This one was drawn after I had completed about half of my dominant figure in the family (the one in the back, that is partially covered).  Speaking of the dominant figure, we were given a week to sculpt it out of Chavant clay.  Its a wax/oil/sulfur based clay that is solid at room temperature, and you have to heat it up to approx. 150 degrees to work with it.  

I found this project really hard, one because I haven't really worked with clay since I was in middle school, and two because the only clay I HAVE ever worked with was water-based (aka, add water and it softens fairly easily).  It was definitely an interesting process of heating the clay in my (brand-new) toaster oven (it was bought for this project and it will never be used for food (something about putting sulfurous clay in my actual oven was off-putting ... hmm)) and forming it with the help of a heat-gun (also new for this project).  Once the clay has cooled, you can carve it with sharpened clay tools and if you need to add any material back, you just heat it up and  add some warmed clay to it.  

So this is my finished dominant figure:

Sorry for the terrible table top, this picture was taken at school on a work table.

It was described by another student as "Tim Burton-esque", but the image I used was of a violent protest, where a guy is hurling a petrol bomb, so it is all based on fire. This week, we had to finish the subdominant and subordinate figures (medium and small sized figures) and this is my result:

Not the best angle, but I think it captured fire okay.

So yeah, that has been my last two weeks, trying to beat this clay stuff into submission.  Its been a lot of work, and I typically spent 2+ hours a day on it. Whew!  So my organization project has taken a back seat (you know, because I am not actually getting graded on the cleanliness and organization of my house), but I hope to start it back up again tonight or tomorrow (I have two research papers due within a week, so that might be wishful thinking).

So much for a quick update!