My Hand in Sculpture

Today was my official first day in sculpture. I have never done sculpture before, unless you count the time we made animals in action out of bread dough (slice of bread and glue) in my art class in High School. I made this little frog laying on it's back catching a fly (the tongue was made out of a paper clip). So back to now, today our teacher told us that we'd be doing hands in an action, meaning a hand in any position we wanted to do. Next he showed us how to use wires (if we wanted the hand to go up doing something instead of just laying down on the base). So after finally getting my wire on my base (which wasn't easy), I grabbed a handful of clay and headed to a sculpture stand.

I decided to try a postion where the hand is reaching out towards something, unfortunantly I was having problems because the wire kept coming out of the top. It must have been just heavy and I wasn't for sure what to do. Well the teacher walked over and told me to try a different pose, so he handed me a clay tool and told me to hold it. I did so and he started smashing up my clay into a blob that looked like my hand a bit and told me to look at the bone sturcture of my hand and go back and forth from studying my hand and working on my clay sculpture. Wow, did that help a lot! It was such a relief to get pointed into the right direction of how to do something like this. So I worked on it for about 2 hours and then wrapped my hand in plastic to put it up until next week. We will be working on this for four weeks (I think that is what he said) and then we'll move on to something new. Ahoj!

My Hand in Sculpture