Sculpture Process

This project has taught me a lot about not only what an artist can do and what an artist is supposed to be, but also what an artist is supposed to do.  The processes that one uses through countless hours of experimentation and patience can be transfered to almost any other department in art.  Weather it be animation, fibers, or even creative writing.  No matter what course of study you plan on exploring, you can apply all that you have learned to them all in more ways than just one.  On a side note, I now have an undying hatred for oranges.

Let me start off by first saying that I have hardly done any sculpture pieces before I came to college.  Most of the things I did in high school art class were drawings of people’s faces and paintings.  For me this was a new and exciting experience to transform a two dimensional drawing of a system in nature and engineer it into a three dimensional abstract sculpture.  At first I had several difficulties working on this because I usually only work in very small scale.  This project really pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me think about how I can creatively solve this problem.  I now know that the scale of the work can greatly effect the outcome of the sculpture.  Being afraid of going to a larger scale can be hard and can lead to doubt.  Depending on the size and dimension that you want to make the work,  it can either distract or help the meaning of the piece.

The process of creating this sculpture pushed me to new creative boundaries and made me think of new ways of expressing meaning through artwork.  I have learned that you can pretty much draw inspiration from anything weather it is a natural system or a man-made object.  When I came up with the first incarnation of my work, I was trying too hard to think about something else and that drastically changed the overall message that my sculpture was giving off.  I then got some good feedback from my peers on what I could do to my piece that would get it back on track.  I then scrapped my first sculpture (meaning I set it aside and started a new idea from scratch) and began to work on a new design for the next incarnation.  Critiques are very valuable when you are an artist.  They can offer really great insight into your work from a viewer’s perspective.  It’s all on how you use their advice because depending on what direction you go, it can either help or hurt your work of art.

A new concept that I now understand a great deal better than before is that experimenting is very helpful to how an artist creates a work of art.  Experimenting can let you explore different possibilities that your project can later transform into.  All this time during this process I was always trying to avoid experimenting like a disease.  My mind was always focused on how much money I would spend on making these experiments.  I would spend the money and buy the supplies and then I would feel like I had not achieved anything new. This led me to become very frustrated.  However,  I did learn something that was really important.  You should not be afraid to experiment.  You must always love your experiments like you would an ugly child.  More importantly, if you get tired of you artwork while you are working on it, it’s best to take a day and do something else.  That way you when you come back to it, you will have fresh new ideas to try out.

Along with experimenting with different ways to create art, there is another element that came to my attention during this project. I learned that there are many decisions to make when working on a piece of art.  I know now that the color’s of your art can affect the feeling of the viewer.  Looking at the others around me and how they went about doing their projects, I found that I should use a complementary color scheme for my piece.  I had a good idea of what I wanted to do in the beginning.  I originally wanted to keep my sculpture white and play with how the light hit the sculpture.  After another critique session, I realized that maybe color was not such a bad idea.  Using the color orange sparingly, I created shapes that not only added more flow to the piece, but made if stand out against the white wall.  Later after I was done adding the orange shapes to the work, I realized that it still needed something extra.  Something else to make the sculpture come off of that ugly white wall.  I originally wanted to add a two dimensional ink drawn illustration as a background to make the sculpture come off of the wall.  I spent hours working in photo shop and drawing all of these individual pieces and in the end I did not end up using them.  Once I put the illustrations up behind the sculpture on the wall, I realized that it just made the sculpture way too busy and distracting.  That’s where the critiques by my classmates really came in handy later.  I then scrapped that experiment with the illustrations for a background and started thinking on another idea to unify and make this sculpture come off of the wall.  I experimented some more and then finally I felt that the approach I was taking with my new idea was a whole lot better then before.

I chose to use a different material for the background, also adding a contrasting blue color.  I created a shape that unified the sculpture and brought the whole thing together.  Then again after critiques the next day, I had a lot of negative feedback about my ideas that I wanted t to use for the sculpture.  So I turned those negative comments into positive ideas for what I could do next to my sculpture.  I learned that it is okay to take apart a section of your artwork and re work it using different materials.  This leads me to my next thing I learned from even more experimentation.  The materials that one uses for any work of art is important.  Experimenting with these materials can let you have a better understanding of what you can and can not do to your sculpture.  One material might not work as well as another one.

Things that once seemed so minor to me in the past now have a greater meaning to me now.  I learned that patience is important to any piece of art which is something that I had almost no sense of in high school.  I always wanted to get everything done the second I started working on it.  To me quantity was more important than quality.  I now realize that a good piece of art cannot be made in a single day.  It takes time and countless hours of experimentation to achieve something of good quality.  Time management is important as well.  Depending on the project and what materials you use, you should always plan ahead so that if something goes wrong or you need to work on your artwork more, you are prepared.