I thought to further the rooster into a sculpture. I’d like to get the expansive visual space of a drawing into sculpture somehow. Take a sheet of the pink or blue foam house insulation, carve your design into it, like a kind of soft wood-block print, and use it for a mold to cast plaster into, to make a low relief plaque. Wanted to try this for sometime since I saw Chris Spice do it.

From the drawing, mostly done with the Dremel tool small sanding cylinder, & simple pounding. Moderate, plain.

 

 

 

Rooster with Plant. One thing, a 20×30 slab of plaster is weak and heavy. Go smaller.

Done freehand with a disk grinder. Immoderate, fast:

 

 

 

 

Rooster Contemplating Egg. 20×20”. Better, but I’d like to see more graphic gesture and less tool marks. Go smaller still.

Drawn directly on foam, Tulips from the garden, cut with X-acto knife. :

 

 

 

 

Getting somewhere. About the right size, small, 10×16”, the mark of the knife is proportional to the size of the page. Better than working from a prepared drawing. Perhaps better still would be no drawing at all and only direct craving from life. And, this kind of foam isn’t so great. It is sort of sticky and doesn’t cut so smoothly. Is there something else better I can find? I see that it is really the tool & a deftness with it, that makes this work. In other words, mastery of the tools and materials, like usual.

I was looking for the looseness and spontaneity of drawing to translate into the sculptural dimension, and this isn’t exactly it. This was all meant to be a relaxing distraction and experiment from my other, more rigorous, processes, but of course, to do it well requires depth of understanding and practice. Wouldn’t I rather just be drawing? Still, I like it, and I’ll probably come back to this again.

Certainty is knowing Who you are, Where you are, and What you’re doing. Maybe I should just double-down on process, detail, and execution?