I want to work here every day for the rest of my life.

The soul-destroying moment when you realise your stupid oven has burnt your tree!

Nothing a bit of primer couldn't fix. Merely an aesthetic issue.

Trees! (For Reals this time!)

 Tree #1 using the proper method of sculpey tree making (read: using welding rod as a skeleton).

The first tree was made through the process of creating a rough skeleton out of welding rod, which not only helps the sculpey hold itself up, but enabled me to make a really strong base for the tree to stand up on. To create the main bulk of the tree, I created long thin rectangles of sculpey, which i wrapped round each of the welding rod "bones", and then twisted and curled the soft sculpey to give a bark-ish texture to it. While I liked the main effect of the process, I felt I could work more with the effect i gave the end of the branches, where i wrapped the thin ends of scupley round the wire in a spiral fashion.

 For the second and third trees, I employed the "spiralling" technique of applying the sculpey. While I feel this technique may result in less realistic looking trees, I think it fits within my surrealism theme, as they look like trees, with their distinctive shape, but up close, the texture is slightly off.

When painting the trees, I stuck to the same three colour schemes I used on the bushes; blue/green, orange/red, and green/orange, in order to give a sense of solidarity and theme.

Model Box Woe

J'aime! :)

Je déteste!! >:(

A brief insight into the creation of my model box.

Technical drawing

The Technical Drawing of the theatre was possibly one of the hardest parts of the project at first, but as I got into it, it became a lot easier.
After being given copies of extremely bad plans (I mean EXTREMELY bad, bit's missing, blurred lines ect) I worked out how to find the scale of said drawings from the one measurement we were given. After the scale had been worked out for both the plan, and the view of the proscenium arch, it as a quite simple task of measuring the original drawing, scaling it, and entering the measurements into autocad.
Some parts were a complete pain to try and decipher from the original drawings, but with a bit of time and patience, all was achieved quite successfully!

Once complete, came the task of printing both drawings at full 1:25 scale to make the building of the model box simpler. This was a task in itself. While the drawing took 2 days at most, from start to finish, working out how to print the drawings at 1:25 took the best part of a week, thanks to impossibly difficult software. Eventually however, I worked it out and was rewarded with my lovely plans in full scale.

The production of the "trees"..or not, as it turned out.

 When beginning to sculpt my trees, i began by making the bathtubs. I found a technical drawing of a traditional rolltop bath (thank you bathstore!) and scaled it down roughly to 1:25, building the shell of the bath around a moulded ball of tin foil (genius!) I didn't craft them as well as maybe would have been expected, partly because damn, sculpey isn't as easy to work with as you may think! and secondly because I didn't want them to be perfect. They're baths with trees growing out of them, so I made the assumption, based on my own designs, that the baths would be extremely worn and dirty, possibly falling apart, therefore it seemed pointless to craft them as perfect little ceramic tubs.

When I started to craft the tree sections, I stumbled upon a problem of sorts. I had no support system, and the sculpey really doesn't hold it's weight very well when it is soft. This led to the "in the moment" design decision to make the bathtubs contain smaller, more bush like formations that could sit alongside taller, more graceful trees, in order to give a little more variety to the stage.

I made 3 of these bathtub bushes, of varying design and height, and painted them in 3 seperate colour schemes: oranges and reds, blues and greens, and a combination of greens and oranges.