Admirers of art who aren't artists themselves might be tempted to think that the creative process is linear, "naturally" easy and filled with sunshine. They are not to blame, really, since artists tend to be a bit secretive about the way they do their work. Its part of the trade. This article is a tell-all piece about how an aspiring artist goes about creating a captivating piece. Disclaimer: this is not how every project goes or how every artist works. Its just a drop in the ocean!
Day 1-3: Starting Out
On one bright and chilly morning, your instructor hands out the prompt. You are required to create a clay sculpture using one out of three methods of abstraction. Abstraction is reducing an object into its basic elements, enough to tell you what it is-minus too much details. For example, a stick-figure is the abstraction of a human form. You spend half an hour looking at the works you have been asked to get inspiration from and you feel a bit disappointed. None of them appeal to you! So, for the next day or so, you are clicking around on the internet for sculptures that you would rather work from. Pintrest becomes your new best friend and it helps, save for the few times some irrelevant (but very interesting) pins pop up and you just cant help but look...
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Day 3-7: Testing Ideas
After finally settling on a style and theme for your piece, its time to get your hands dirty. You want to execute the marvelous idea of making a crawling human form. Yep, gestural art stole your heart. Sleeves are all rolled up and your favorite getting-work-done playlist is blasting on repeat through your headphones. You want to make more than just one sculpture, so you divide up your good ol' block of Roma Plastilina clay into chunks. There's something satisfying about only using your hands so you stick with that for a while, until you are advised to incorporate tools because your hands are warm and they make the clay melt. Another anatomy lesson comes your way when your instructor adds that fingers tend to produce rounded forms. You don't say!
Day 8-9: Moving Along
Business is kind of slow because no matter how much you measure, cut, or level, your clay keeps rebelling and taking on different shapes other than the intended ones. Also, you realize, from the photo documentation you are making, that some of your proportions are iffy. During desk critique, your instructor suggests that you could find a real model to take photos of and work using their posture. It sounds like a good idea, but it is going to be the weekend and people have plans which certainly do not include posing for you. So you decide to hit the pause button on your project. Classic procrastinator move but oh well, once you find a model you will get back to sculpting.
Day 10: Break Time
Basically you do nothing towards your project. You know better but hey, you are still trying to find that model, wink wink.
Day 11: Working Day/Night
When you woke up this morning, you still did not have a model. What's even worse, your sculptures are still lying on your desk in unfinished lumps from two days ago. It is now past seven at night, and you are desperate to photograph somebody, anybody, for your project. The second person you ask is up for it and you promise a mystery reward for their time. You take photos from different angles and thankfully your model is a fantastic poser. They stay still making the images clear and consistent. Armed with your long-awaited photos, you get on Photoshop to enlarge them to the paper-size you hope your sculptures would be in. The final ones are grayscale and fill an 8 by 11.5 inches sheet in landscape mode. At around midnight, you go to the studio and start sculpting. To make things easier, you are modelling your work on top of the photos so the scale is right.
Day 12: New Ideas
A few days until the deadline, you conveniently come up with a new direction into your work. Nice. Why did you think of this sooner? The abstraction style you first chose has been progressively disappearing in your sculpture so you decide on a different method. Your instructor agrees with you (yaay), saying that your plan actually makes sense. However, given the refining needed, there might not be enough time to do all three figures by the time the work is due. But you are going to try anyway! The worst that would happen is that you would only finish one. You load more music, and keep sculpting at a times two speed than before. Its a race against time!
Day 13: Finishing Up
Looking at the calendar you realize that it has been almost two weeks of squishing greasy clay in your hands. Which, if you are wondering, is a pain to wash off. As much as it has been fun, a part of you is looking forward to getting done. But, does your work look complete? Not quite. The figures are too rough for presentation. It is time to smooth them over and examine how they would work together as a unit. The studio gets smaller as the night goes by as others finish their work. Before you start to think that you are too slow, two more people walk in to work.Yes! You are not alone. The sculptures seem to be taking good form. Somewhere between pressing the pieces together you notice that creating holes in your work in the fashion of the abstraction form you want actually works well. Looking at the watch, its almost your bedtime so you make some finishing touches, scribble a title of your work, and peace out.
And that, folks, is how an art project really goes.
