Saturday, April 10, 2010

Blogging Again! New Mini blobness

Yeah! I am finally getting caught up enough in my resin production that I feel I can justify some time spent on the blog. As you can see from the date of my last post, it's been very neglected. Poor blog.

After about 2 and 1/2 weeks from now, I plan to be fully caught up on all my Darcy, Beth, Gawyn, and SG orders and will start on Legacy and Darling orders. Those should take me about 3 weeks to get caught up on as well. Darling is actually my NAN donation horse this year too. My creative juices have been overflowing and I have been near twitching to start new pieces. I have so many ideas lined up in my head it's starting to get crowded up there. ;)

I haven't had much extra time while I play catch up, but here and there when I could sneak in some sculpting time I've been working on a couple new pieces. These will be the first of the line-up to escape my head's captivity. I want to play with different scales so I can appeal to a wider market. So while one is still a traditional piece - the very much anticipated Morgan Stallion to complete the Darcy and Elizabeth set, the other is on the opposite end of the size scale - a 3" tall representation of Darcy! MINI Darcy! Now that the big gal is sold out, I felt it would be okay to start speaking of the shrunk down version. I thought it would be nice to give those who wanted a Darcy but couldn't afford her another option. Also, many people who only collected the smaller scale loved the big one, but again, wouldn't buy because she *was* traditional.

Mini Darcy is a completely new endeaver for me. The scale is very small, and at first I was a little intimidated. I also planned to use a wire armature with Apoxie Sculpt as my medium, instead of my normal J-Mac clay. The reason being I knew I would want to sand things down and get sharper curves, and I didn't think I'd be able to get that smooth look I wanted in complete clay form. So, a hardening material would be needed. I had a new order of Apoxie Sculpt sitting on my drafting table going "Pick me! Pick me!" so I did. :) I'm actually having quite a bit of fun with the medium. I don't plan on switching over to use it on my larger sculptures, but it's working out wonderfully on the smaller one! The technique is so different and the only thing I get a little frustrated with is the fact that I need to work in small layers and wait until that layer dries before adding a new piece. But, working with my oils has taught me much patience. :)

A lot of you are probably asking, "Well, why didn't you just have her digitally reduced like Mini Scarlett was and Bitty Bosco was?" The digital reduction process is *extremely* expensive (like around $2K). I've also heard that the master copy you get to work on has these lines running through the resin, which is extremely hard and difficult to sand down. Mane and tails are so bad as to almost be easier to resculpt. So, I thought it'd be more fun (and certainly easier on the wallet) to sculpt the complete piece from scratch and save myself all that not-fun work.

I thought it'd be a fun and interesting thing to see the process of her morphing into a blob on wires to somthing that resembled a horse. She still has lots of issues here that will be sanded down and redone, but again, these are the early stages and just shown as a explanatory peek into the process of sculpting a mini with Apoxy Sculpt, sand paper, and carbide scrapers. More to come. :)