Wire'm I doing this?!

Aka, experimenting with a new technique when I should be doing important stuff

Supposed to be doing Clear Out phase 3 but my attention is all over the place. I've resized 6 images for making cards and they’re pencilled on ready to colour...somehow. Not decided what medium to use yet; maybe water colour pencils or acrylic inks. Will play with a few ideas before I put brush to paper. This is my problem; I know the starting point for a painting or sculpture but how it will finally look...that's more work than making the actual piece.

So, not content with having 3 almost-but-not-quite-finished small acrylic paintings by my chair...I suddenly fancied trying wire sculpture. You’d think I had enough to do but, nope. I was off again with a new idea. They have a habit of coming at the most inopportune times.

Anyhow, I checked out a few YouTube videos first. If you fancy a go, have a look at the amazing fairies at Fantasy Wire to whet your creative appetite. For a great little tutorial on making a human figure with the correct proportions, try Ms Lindsey. One of my fave sculptors is a French lady called Laure F. I love the hand painted papers she uses to cover her elegant and so very stylish figures and really recommend looking at her work. Note, her website (on my laptop anyway) seems not to have a scroll function so things chop off at the bottom but if you click ‘le book/my book’ then click the expand arrows you can see all her pieces.

Okay, here goes

I put wire sculpting in the category of ‘don’t be fooled; it’s way harder than it looks’ along with acrylic pours and abstract painting. I started out with a super secure armature then got in a pickle right away with the head. I had the cute but dumb notion of wrapping a colourful glass bead like jewellers do but man, that’s much harder than it looks and the wire kept slipping all over the place. But I persevered and got it sort of okay-ish. I expected the rest would be a doddle after that. Wrong again. The body's wire was a bit less bendable than needed and was quite hard work to wrap and once I’d got the torso and one leg done...decided I hated it. And it was already quite heavy. It did not look like I imagined. Things rarely do when you try them for the first time. So I un-stripped it all because sometimes it's better to ditch something that's not working sooner rather than later!

At least that left me with a good armature and it’s now halfway to being a completed paper pulp sculpture instead, though I think the legs are a bit long. Need to fix that. I still really love the idea of the wire work and really want to find a way to make nice pieces that take less time so I can have affordable sculptures of varying types. I'll have another shot at some point but make sure I have the correct gauge wire first.

Back to business

It hasn’t all been play and nonsense. I watched a video from an artist who talked about her average day as a full time creator and was really surprised that only about 5% of her time was painting. The rest was marketing, filming and editing her videos, doing Patreon content, online tutoring and so on. Being self employed in this way (or any other) means taking on many new tasks beyond the main business idea of course but the tiny art time was a shock! It helps to be aware of this when it feels like all your time is spent on non-art areas.

One task most artists loathe is marketing but I’ve come to accept that without it I’ll struggle to be seen. It’s fair to say many artists want their work to be out there but don’t want themselves to be! I’m kinda the same but did some brainstorming this last week about how to get balance point sculpture out in the world better than I’ve been (not) doing. You can treat it as a game, see it as another creative challenge or just chill out and try a bunch of things and see what works - either way you have to do it.

Site improvements

That gives me yet another list of tasks to do. But it’s fine. It’s all part of the process and I’m picking up helpful information from many different areas which go into my note book. I drive myself mad with all the pieces of paper that pile up with notes and ideas scribbled on. Every now and then I sort them into subject piles and try to get them into dedicated notebooks (I have far too many) but it’d be better if I’d just do that in the first place.

This morning I've added Folksy's shop widget and if I've done it right, clicking any item will take you to my shop front. I've also removed those images from this site's 3 gallery pages and consolidated the rest into just one, which gives a cleaner look and makes it more obvious that it's a gallery. Most of these will go to the shop at some point but I don't want to dump everything there in one go and besides, some earlier pieces are being edited a bit to make them match the bases of the newer work. See what I mean about not knowing the final look right away?

And I did manage to sort, clear, pack and donate some more belongings after all that. Progress :)