Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Latest Sculpture Progress Pics

I know, it's been forever since I've written, right? Well, I'm going to attempt to be more faithful at "blogging" from now on. This is a great way to share what's going on in my studio! The website can be for the finished pieces and the blog will be there to show you how they got there!

First on that list of projects to be shared will be the sculpture I'm working on right now. He's a traditional scale Gypsy Vanner/hairy draft type horse. Gelded. He'll be "large traditional" only because of the draft part, but he's to scale with my other normal trad. horses.

I wanted to do a drafter that was a little different. In the photos I was looking through to get inspired, most of them were of nice rounded and collected trotting drafters being ridden on the flat. I loved it and thought, how cool would it be to make a draft horse with performance in mind?! And sooo many people want a *hairy* drafter and there's a serious lack of correct quality pieces of them. So I'm trying to "fill the gap" again. Not only will this big guy be correct when he is finished, he'll be very performance friendly - even with the big hair! And by performance, I mean more than just a harness horse.

He's still got a long way to go here, but you can get a pretty good idea of where's he's going from these shots. Photos are an excellent way to look at the same piece with a new eye. For example, in person, I've been staring at that left shoulder for a while, knowing something wasn't quite right. When I looked at the photo, I cringed because I could finally see just how off it was! The point of shoulder and in particular the elbow are WAY to high and need to be dropped. This of course, moves the rest of the leg's proportions...which stinks to have to redo, but really needs to happen so it will. The right shoulder has been bothering me too. I think I need to widen the muscles above the elbow back a little. It looked okay in person, but now that I'm seeing them with those new eyes, it looks a mite too small and disproportional to the rest of the piece.

As usual, the head and ears, mane and tail, are the very last things to get finished. They are really just roughed in here and will have lots of work done to them at the end. I'm hoping to have him finished within the next couple of weeks. As the sculpting is my full time job now, I shouldn't have a problem with that goal. And as always, critiques and comments are ALWAYS welcome and most appreciated! Please e-mail them to me at the new e-mail: jenn @ aspenleafstudiosllc . com (without the spaces).

Photos (click on them to open the full picture - a lot of them got cropped because of format issues on the blog):