The piece that most of you saw me working on the majority of the time was the wire tree. I wanted to do some kind of piece that involved using recycled materials and making them into something beautiful, since most people find them to be ugly and either just throw them out or just recycle them. I had originally planned to do a little garden, but thought that to be too mundane and after some research, I discovered the wire tree. Albeit they are usually much smaller and made as little decorative jewelry pieces, I decided to see if I could use the same method and make a lifesize one.
The following are just a few pictures of what it looked like when I was first starting it. I don't have any more than that because I forgot to take pictures as I continued to work, plain and simple, so, yeah, my fault. But basically, as you can see, I twisted the wire together, and as it got bigger, I had to manually twist them together.
Everyone asked what had happened to the tree. Problem was that I should've figured that wire is too flimsy by itself. However, I thought that if I wrapped it with more wire it would become sturdy enough to stand. Wow, how wrong I was. Putting more wire on more wire doesn't do anything but make it heavier. It was still flimsy. By this time I realized this and tried to make wooden legs for it to stand and then attach a dowel rod inside of the void created from wrapping around the legs. When I tried to put the tree into the tree base, the base cracked and I knew it was too heavy and I didn't know what else I could try. Rather than come into class the next day and completely embarrass myself with a tree that wouldn't even stand, I abandoned the project and took all the little flowers and leaves that were supposed to fill out the tree limbs and just made them into a little garden. And thus it came to be the crappy sculpture you see now.
Needless to say, I was thoroughly pissed with myself. I thought I was doing much better in this class than in my last sculpture class, and to end the semester with a sculpture this bad was really embarrassing for me and just a really big let down. I know everyone always says the whole, "If I had more time, I would've done this...", and this'll be the first time I'm saying it. If I could go back and redo this sculpture, I think I'd probably try building the tree trunk out of styrofoam and wrapping the wire around that, and it would've been a lot more stable and light. I believe I will try this because I really would like some closure on this project. The second piece I made came out the best because I had enough time to start over from scratch and fix all the problems that had occured before.
...Wow, I think this is the most I've ever written in any of my blogs. Ah well, it's always the really bad ones that get all the talk, no? It's always hard to think about what you want to say in front of an audience, but at least in the blog I can write everything out. ^^;; Everyone has their triumphs and failures, and for me this was a really big one. If any good came from this, it was the fact that it was a good lesson to me and I feel like I have a little more knowledge and experience with the material so that if I choose to work with it again, I might be able to manipulate it better. Sorry I blabbed so much, but this is just something I really had to get out. Thank you for your comments and I hope you guys have a wonderful and safe holiday vacation.
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