The Shelley City Council accepted my proposal for my bust of John F. Shelley to go in City Hall. This week I finished him up, and Hollowed him out. Here is a picture of me doing that.

If you are unaware about how firing a water based clay sculpture works allow me to explain. First of all you need to make the sculpture. I do this using an armature (which for this case is really just a metal pipe and a ball of paper). The armature is what keeps the clay up. Once the sculpture is done you can’t just put it in the kiln and fire it. First it needs to be hollowed out. There are a few reasons you do this. For one it makes it not nearly as heavy. This sculpture required about 150 pounds of clay to make and when it was hollowed out it was around 75 pounds. It will be even lighter after it is dried and fired. Hollowing out also helps your sculpture not explode in the kiln. The moisture in the clay comes out in the kiln and if the clay is too thick it has a hard time coming out and starts exploding.
You can see from the picture that I cut off the top of the head to do this hollowing. I also laid him down on a pillow and hollowed from the bottom as well.
Now that this sculpture is finished and drying I am able to work again on my little girl praying. Coming back to it with fresh eyes made me see a lot of things I needed to finish, fix, and change. This is a work in progress but it is coming along.

I also received some exciting news. I told you before on this blog that my sculpture Out on the Town was not accepted by the Meridian Arts Commission. Well I recently found out that the chose another sculpture for the location they had planned but they are currently discussing funding and placement options for my sculpture as well. They liked it a lot but felt that it would be better in a place that received less vehicular traffic and more pedestrian traffic. It is not for certain yet but hopefully I will be creating this sculpture for Meridian after all.