MATERIALS
As soon as I chose to work with pennies, I knew basically what I wanted to do with it. The form evolved from a representational sculpture to a larger version of what it ended up as. Due to the limitations of my finances and time, I had to remove a large piece of understructure from the piece in order to finish on time, however, I didn't want to compromise the form because of these limitations. I knew the object (pennies) was almost completely dependent on the form of the piece and vice versa. Without the scale pattern of the pennies, the shape would've been meaningless and overly simplified, and without the form, the scale pattern wouldn't have been recognizable.
I suppose the piece could've been made with some other scale-like object, such as guitar picks or other types of coins, but that would've been too expensive. In any case, the color and abundance of the pennies is unique. The diversity in age, wear, discoloration and placement (head vs. tails) added a life-like quality and an element of shimmer to the tail. Because of this, the piece has a different look from every angle.
I made some discoveries while working with the pennies and styrofoam on this project. For one, when you get a large number of pennies in one place (say, like 2300+ in a CapriSun box), the get heavy. Same when you place all 2300 on a brittle styrofoam understructure. On that note, styrofoam is a very difficult material to work with. It certainly doesn't help that I'm awful at carving. It doesn't like to be glued, either to itself or when having other materials glued to it (consequently, most of the pennies are actually glued to one another as opposed to the styrofoam itself). I had some issues with pennies breaking off from the structure when moving it and the structure even broke under it's own weight a couple times. Also, turns out, styrofoam is expensive. Thank goodness for Christmas gift cards from Hobby Lobby, no? Back to the side of the pennies, they are not malleable like real scales. This made forming around the curves rather difficult in some places.
FORM
I used color, texture and value most of all in this project. The variation in color and texture adds depth to the repetitive patterns. I debated on cleaning the coins for a uniform look or placing them all heads or tails up, however, I realized that the different colors added interest and, as someone pointed out, a sort of natural camouflage look. Nature uses patterns in a similar way, but not always in a perfect, or even obvious, way. The imperfect repetition and rhythm makes the piece interesting, life-like and give it movement.
PROCESS/AMBITIOUSNESS
The most ambitious part of this project was the sheer number of pennies I had to use. I ended up covering the piece with almost $23.00, give or take. It was tedious work to glue them all tot he foam, though I ran out of glue before pennies.
My initial imagining was to do a dragon, however that was before I was told to do a nonrepresentational object. After that, I settled on a ambiguous tail/worm shape. As I got closer to the end, I realized I wasn't going to be able to cover the whole structure with the money I had, so in this edit I took this opportunity to change the form once more. From the worm shape, I changed the form to a tail coming from the wall to suggest a larger creature on the other side of the wall. I felt this added an element of fantasy and suggested an exaggerated scale. I feel that the original idea would've been more ambitious due to the detailed carving involved as well as having to make a more defined shape. Due to the lack of flexibility of the pennies, they would not have shaped very well with the detailed lines.
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| I was so sad to have to uninstall! Especially when it wouldn't fit though the space between the wall and the shelves and it broke :( Super sadface!! :C (The sign says : You Can Pet Me! In fact, please do! Just don't feed me. I'm big enough as it is.) |
I didn't get much feed back from the crit because we had to rush so much after lunch. One constructive criticism I received from Kathy was just to make sure it fit up agains the wall better. That precision with come with more practice with the power tools. X)
That's all for now! Thanks!
-Emily
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