Michelen Man Sculpture

So over the course of the second half of my semester I've been working on a sculpture in one of the classes I'm taking that I rarely mention here. TMP I Construction (the other being the super boring, waste of time A(rt)D(esign)P(erspectives) I The Creators). I've not oft mentioned it because while I really enjoy working with my hands, I've found sculpture not to be my favorite hands on activity. Especially when we've been working with clay and plaster the entire semester (o.k. a tiny bit of cardboard was in there too).

The sections are also supposed to have a wood project. Other sections of the course have made some really cool bench's that I was really jealous they got to do. My prof likes clay, allot. So we've done it, allot. I hate how dry it makes my hands, takes a solid day of moisturizer to get them not feeling like cotton balls. But that is besides the point.

I've made the Michelin Tire Man! I decided to do him because then I wouldn't have to do muscles or clothing! It took while to make him, but it was ultimately not that hard, just time consuming (like everything else in art school). He's pretty cool.




























Our next step is to ruin the clay model. We're casting them out of plaster, by covering them in plaster. Not sure how that is going to work, but OK.

First we've added our shim walls made from aluminum (Arizona Juice) cans. These give us section splits to take the plaster molds off in.
I did the Michelin Mans head first and it looked like he had a halo.









Next we covered the suckers in plaster. Something was wrong with one of the layers of plaster I put on the top half of his back. Not good. Not good at all. I've made it work through extensive patching with more good plaster over it to give it strength, but oh boy do I handle it gingerly. I've got that section off here and was working on the bottom half of his backside. All the coils I used for his tires came off with the mold.










The bottom half removed. All the coils were cut by the aluminum shim walls so it's interesting to see the core of his leg surrounded like that.















The mold for the lower section of his back, i.e. legs and the base.












It was actually quite fun to pull that stupid clay Michelin Man apart. I spent so much time on him, it was like sweet revenge.
As you can see, he had a foam and wire armature that we put clay over for initial forming, which of course, stay in. Until this of course.











The front half of the mold was one large piece as we didn't have to worry about the armature pipe. This is pretty cool looking I think, but I may just know how many stinking hours it took me to get here!

Tomorrow we do the casting part. We'll see.













Thanks for reading!