Wires, wobbles and wide angle witchery

Or, how to get sculptures to sit right and how to get them to look right on camera

Okay, so this last week has been let's-try-out-some-new-stuff time. I've wanted to give some attention to acro gymnastics for ages (I did a trio in polymer clay a few years ago and it now lives in The Netherlands). It gets lots of views on my old Artweb site so, fans of the sport aside, this kinda stuff gets attention. I've also wanted to do some smaller pieces to have a wider price range so I started off with some acro. Here's how that turned out.

My armatures were for a figure 8cms tall. That's pretty small but they'd be quick to do, right? Mm, not quite. You can see from the image below that correctly placing and connecting two tiny armatures wouldn't be a quick 'n' easy job. It wasn't. I'd started on the base and done a bit of the top before leaving it to the next day to see what needed fixing. A bit of wire wrestling ensued and it sat like it was meant to. Great. Carried on adding pulp.

But...not very much. In short, the piece is good enough and very dainty but the pulp density isn't enough to lock the top firmly - it has a bit of movement to it. Not super bad but...I can't decide if they're up to spec for selling. I have a few more armatures pre-made so I'll have another bash but alter the connection a bit.

What next? Go up a size. I made two armatures 12cm tall and this time things went much better. Eventually. I haven't done a couple in a long while and forgot that it's best to make the connecting parts all once piece of wire rather than trying to stick them together. After that realisation, I cut a new piece of wire which both anchored the base to the wood and built solid support for both sets of arms. Much wrapping, grappling, twisting, taping and constant re-positioning was needed but at the end, I had a rock solid armature from top to bottom - exactly what you want. Then all you have to do is start sculpting.

Below is the finished armature. The total sculpt is actually nearly done and I'm really pleased with how it's looking so far. Looking forward to doing more of these in the future.

I now have a method to cover women's artistic, rhythmic and acro gymnastics to go with the dance and cirque and also have a couple of new products to try. One I've had a bash at before and I know how that works, the other is still being built in my head. All I can say is, those shallow postal boxes that were sent in the wrong size now have a use.

On a different note, some of my images have been really hard to do well as there's often some distortion of a foot or a limb that makes them look very weird. Apparently it's to do with the wide angle lenses on smart phones. The trick will be to step back rather than lean in; to keep things at the edge of the frame from being...at the edge of the frame. The pic above was a quick and dirty test of that just now. It's a bit better than the ones I took two nights ago. This will need some experimentation to get right but at least I now know what's causing it.