Phoenix take two.

Cross-posted to the artblog.

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Okay so.

I am in the process of remaking the phoenix.

This is why.

- My mom keeps pushing me to get my work out. Sell it, get it seen by other people than the ones living in my house, et cetera. To grow as an artist, and build my stupid self-esteem, and such.
- Couple of days ago she was telling me that I ought to sell the phoenix to one of the doctor-people she knows through work. Said it would fit as a decoration in a clinic or office or hospital or something. This idea made me slightly uncomfortable and extremely self-conscious, but the only coherent answer I could give was '..That would be weird. Then lots of people would see it.'
- Last night at dinner my mom offered to buy it from me. I asked what she would do with it, because she kept talking earlier about letting her sell it for me since I'm apparently so afraid to do it myself. (I could sell it myself. On the internet. I could totally do it over the internet. Not in person. That would make me feel awkward.) So I said, 'Sure, buy it from me,' and we worked it out.
- Then she says, 'We're going to have to mount it.' Okay. No problem. Will take some effort, because I was dumb and didn't take display into consideration while making it, but we'd been discussing it with my dad earlier and he said we would figure it out. (Parents are many things, including engineers. Dad's a physicist. We've got this down.)
- Then she says, 'I'm donating it to an auction for charity.'
- Then my brain says
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- Then I kind of sputter for a bit.
- This amuses my family, because they know that I'm this way about my art.
- My parents and I stare at the mask for a while, trying to figure out a good way to mount it. You see, I did not take mechanical structure into account while building it, because I'm stupid and don't think ahead, so we have a difficult task ahead.
- We go out to see what we can find.
- First to Michael's. They have display cases; unfortunately, we cannot find anything that will hold the bird's eighteen-inch wingspan. They have shadow boxes; unfortunately, they are all very shallow, and the bird is five inches in depth.
- Then to A C Moore's. Not really expecting anything better, because in past experience Michael's has more stuff anyways, but we try just in case. They have even less options.
- Next to Home Depot. (These stores are all very close to each other.) I have been insisting the whole time that maybe we can just build a box to hold it, to which my dad replies that we will not have adequate time to build a box nice enough for it. (The auction is on Saturday.) We do not find anything that will help. My box idea won't work, because the miter saw in our basement only holds a two-inch board while ours would be a six-inch, and the band saw on which you can have them cut board for you at Home Depot does not do miter cuts.
- I have an idea: What if we take the glass out of a shadow box? The other two dimensions will hold fine. We go back to Michael's, and buy the largest one.
- Back home. We sit staring at the mask again. My dad decides that the best and probably only stable way to go about this is for me to make a cushion shaped as a face, as part of the display, and that we can glue the mask to the cushion and, since the cushion would be built with structure in mind, it will be easier to fasten it to the back of the box. I think this is a good idea; I say that I will go get materials and make it the next day.
- It is today now. My mom calls me from work, and I wake up. She tells me that she and dad have been talking about it some more, and they think that it will be much easier for me to just make a new phoenix.
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- Okay, so maybe it would be easier in terms of design. This new one would be built over a sturdy armature, which will make it easy to mount it on the board in the box. Now, also, I won't have to attempt something totally new with the cushion, which might not even work.
- Still, though.
- Making it again?
- I sigh and tell myself that it will probably be easier the second time around, now that I already have the design down, as well as the techniques, and hey, the armature should make it easier, right?
- No.
- I soon remember why I hate building on wire armatures. I mean, even if you forget the fact that I couldn't make it sturdy enough, so my parents came home for lunch so my dad could help me with it. -headdesk- No, the real reason why wire armatures are frustrating is when the wire isn't where you want it to be, and it comes poking out of the clay. Then the clay starts sliding off it when you want it to be going back on. Then you can't get the wire into the right position without tearing off all the clay in that area, and then once you've adjusted it, the wire is wrong right next to where you just fixed.
- So it took about an hour longer to make this phoenix.
- And it's just a phoenix, now; we decided that since this is purely decoration anyways, and we don't necessarily need my mask concept - I just wanted to be able to make a phoenix into a mask, after all; it was a personal project - this one's just a phoenix. No eyeholes. So this is a good thing and a bad thing. I had to adjust the design a bit. Then it started looking unbalanced. Got all frustrated. And even though making the feathers is fairly easy, it's tedious.
- One good thing that came of this: I've been taking WIP pictures at every step (although I forgot that I was planning to until after I had covered the armature a teeny bit, so there's no photo of just the wire). This is a good reference for myself, and also I might put them together and put them..somewhere. Artblog, maybe.

So anyways. Phoenix take two just came out of the oven. I'm right now waiting for it to cool down, and then I'll put down the base red. Hopefully the paint job will go faster than the last one did, at least.

Olivia

PS. The blood-sweat-and-tears rating for this project is nearing a four. Just because it is so frustrating to have to redo everything, and for a while I thought it was going to be fine, only to be vastly disappointed in my skills in dealing with armature.