It's a wrap! Maybe...

Er, stick, glue, unwrap, mould, glue again...

Frustrating week with my latest mixed media piece. This is a good example of how, when you teach yourself how to make armatures and start getting adventurous, well, things don’t always work out as you imagine. Everything is an experiment and experiments don’t always work. But they force you to get creative, try different fixes and eventually (maybe) to think in a more strategic manner! I'm a *bodger so logic isn't my natural way of thinking.

[*bodger - someone who grabs whatever they have to hand then tries to figure out how to make something. It can work but it aint always pretty.]

I spent a fair bit of time getting the leg angles just right then changing the arm positions around three or four times before I was happy with the way it looked. One tiny change can affect the balance and expression so it’s worth experimenting, but try it in your imagination first since the metal can only take so much re-positioning before it breaks.

But the actual problem was connecting separate wires from two directions. I don’t have a solder and I’m not sure how to do that anyway. I should probably figure that out at some point. So, I have the sprite leaping off the ground but supported by a wire embedded in the base. The problem was how I attached the two wires. I guess I didn’t think it through and assumed that threading the support wire through a gap in the two twisted wires of the legs, then wrapping with a finer wire would do it. After wrapping the whole limb with tape it felt like it would be okay once I started adding modrock.

Nope. After a bit of working on arms and torso the attachment worked a bit loose so I tightly re-wrapped the intersection...still kept rolling around but okay, keep working on the rest of it and maybe it'll better once the modrock fully hardened.

If at first...

Nope. Okay, wrapping just isn’t going to work. I stripped everything off including the tape and mixed up a bit of Milliput, planning to plug any gaps between the twisted wires and the support and stop it from rolling around. Not sure what happened with that. Maybe I got the two part ratio a bit off as it did seem to take a long time to start hardening so I left it to later in the evening. Mm, still seemed a bit crumbly. Left it overnight. Nope. Definitely not set properly. Dammit!

Deep breath. What other options do I have? Oo! I have some metal epoxy for fixing cars that I picked up from Halfords a few years ago. Luckily it was still useable as I’d wrapped it really well. Hacked out all the suspiciously crumbly Milliput and rolled a little bit of expoxy. Half the first tiny batch was rock solid before I got to use it since I’d forgotten it went off in only 10 minutes. Anyway, I jammed the rest into every gap I could find...and waited.

[Meanwhile an immense torrential downpour pounds the streets and creates waterfalls off roof tops. Nice bit of thunder (setting off car alarms) to add to a thoroughly wet afternoon.]

Success!

And you know what? Still didn’t work ha ha! Oh, it gummed all the wire wrapping together but it didn’t totally stick to the support wire...which was plastic coated and maybe the reason why the leg still kept rolling around a bit. I’d kind of...forgotten about the plastic coating. Hmm.

Last gasp attempt – there’s a weeny hair thin gap between the epoxy and the support wire so I dripped in good old super glue at both ends and...waited. Ooo that seems to have been the final step needed. Nice and solid. Yay! Now I can re-wrap the limb and finish the rest of the piece. A final addition will be another wire added to the base which will balance everything out and double the stability. Learned (again) that time taken on an armature is time well spent and saves a lot of unnecessary messing and swearing. Mental pictures do not always translate into real world mechanics. The following morning it's all still feeling solid so I'm cracking on with it and finishing off the paper additions to the other two pieces. All this sculpture malarkey aint as easy as it looks on those YouTube videos.