Come up and see my collection of shrunken heads…

Trying out slip-cast porcelain. These will be coloured with different techniques. I need to do something besides bronze, and after forays into a couple of other media this is looking promising. It ticks the boxes I want: lightweight, inexpensive, suited to the kind of thing I like making, and not physically demanding, hazardous, messy or needing a lot of space. I’ve never got into working directly with clay, mainly I think because I don’t like the feel of it on my hands, but this process is comparatively hands-off. The mould is plaster. Because the clay shrinks you can get away with a bit of undercut, though not much; but minor damage is easy to repair.

With more dramatic arms & flaring coat. I tried to get the coat looking good in the round without taking much liberty with measurements.

Looking at early photos of him when he was a flute player, I think I was pretty hard on that piece. I felt dissatisfied with it for reasons that now seem silly, though I do think the bell-ringing hands should be easier to cast than fiddly flutering fingers. Maybe I’ll revisit it at larger, less fiddly size. I want to finish up the detail and get him Done before some new cycle of dissatisfaction starts, since he has been nearly finished more than once.