365/13 - Day 34

working on plaster cloth guys

Today I got started early working with plaster cloth which is pretty unusual -- plaster cloth seems to be primarily a late-afternoon-to-late-into-the-night activity for me.

The Universal collaborators dropped in at around 10:15 this morning and started poking at me.  By 10:30 I was wrist-deep in plaster cloth...trying to round off the Atomic Fireball Happy Hour guy's head.  I ended up using a lot of plastic bags and wrappers to give me a basic shape to build on -- including all of that discarded plastic wrap that I used to protect the manikin yesterday.

Not too bad.  I still need to do the sides of his head in front of his ears and maybe part of his jaw area.  I am surprised it is as even as it is.

I was also surprised to look back through the blog and find that I was working on this guy way back on November 29, 2011 -- it looks like that is the day he got his antlers/branches.  See that blog entry here.

Shortly after I was done with that session of plaster cloth I came into the studio to go through my collages that are in progress.  I chose the most recent one (it started out as a painting of lemons).  I have been having trouble seeing anything in it but today when I stood it up by the door and turned it one time it was instantly obvious that this is another dog.  Wow.  I don't know how I missed it before.

I started adding in some faint pencil lines and then I printed out a couple of copies to draw on.  I am playing around with two or three ideas right now, but here is the basic look.

And then later on in the afternoon I needed to work on plaster cloth again.  I thought I was going to get back to the branchy guy but I just wasn't feeling it.  Instead I worked on strengthening all of the parts of the guy from last night with the long horns.  He got at least four layers of plaster cloth on all of the sides of his torso, then I worked on the joins for his legs and arms, then I moved on to the face and neck and head.  His torso was as smooth as his face when I first started out.  I may go back and smooth it out again when I put the next layer of plaster cloth on his horns...but maybe by then I will have come up with more of a back story for him and he may want to have an uneven surface.  Dunno yet.

Oh -- I also gesso coated the manikin this afternoon.  I might have an idea for him now...yay.  

And here are all of the plaster cloth guys drying together tonight.