Bigger and bigger dolls part 3

larger and larger! its posed kind of emerged by itself... but doesn

I guess I may as well refer to this trial as Alpha 3.0 since that track seems to be working. I tried new ways to make his feet look round (my inspiration for the feet, so far as I can tell, is more or less drawn from cartoons– at least, that’s the only place I’ve seen feet with this bulbousness and I always just imagine him that way.. in the illustrations, he quite often has extremely bulbous, anamorphic feet) Again, I kind of let the hands slide. If you look carefully, you’ll see they don’t look like much. His torso came out more or less uneven too, but I figured heck he’s a step towards something.

Look closely at the knees– hopefully one of these photos will let you do that– I found out that taking a more-or-less square piece of cardboard, and then cutting the end in FRINGES– before, I had been cutting in jagged V-shapes when I was trying to get a round curve… lots of uneven-ness) The fringes naturally want to fold and interlace into each other when you bend them together. It was the only way I could find to get such a round knee (I was especially happy with his right knee) and didn’t feel too obligated beyond that.

I kept putting off and putting off getting into the face… until I wound up neglecting to do it entirely. Oh well, he doesn’t really need one, does he?

Yes, his fingers are just scrolled up cardboard. I tried to fill the sockets with glue, and then with clay…

which looked pretty corny but eh.

Then, finally, I got the nerve to FIBERGLASS him… I did it late at night outside… I had fiberglass fabric, and I had cut it into strips (it didn’t dawn on me or I somehow forgot, in my excitement to get started, that fiberglass tape exists– well they didn’t have any at automart anyway) so anyways strips– and i mixed up the goo ever so carefully— and I ran out of both resin/hardener and strips before I was even halfway done. Looks like I under-estimated how large his surface actually was… or under-estimated how far the fiberglass goes. Well, I had only cut up about a 4th of what I had, so I continued a different night… Still didn’t finish. I saved it for a few weeks later.

Yes there are/were fringes that stick up… and get frozen that way– a bit poky. And yes it was uneven… Difficult to get under his arms, and his hands, again, were just a mess– Not entirely well planned. Well, I tried to get my mistakes with each go, or at least I planned to.

I was expecting to finish up the glassing on the 3rd night- but I made some kind of mistake. The other nights, the stuff was cured in 2 hours without question. But this time… It was still sticky, I don’t mean gummy, I mean just as gooey as when I first layed it down, 5 hours before… NOOOOOO!! destroyed– putrid-smelling, unsandable, un-bondo-able, un-anything-able… another failed experiment..

And what caused this small catastrophe?

Whether I was over-confident with the process or was tired or in a bad mood– or whether my mixing-bowl had some nasty ancient resin still-unhardened left in it, (which was because usually, I’d been using a measuring cup to measure out the resin, and then pouring it in a second bowl for the hardening. To my surprise, one day I discovered that the resin in the measuring cup was still fluid– and letting off a hideous odor that was nastifying my closet… and scaring my roommates a little. So I decided I’d get rid of the measuring cup by mixing the hardener directly into it… Yes, by close to the end of my process, there was a definite wierd super-rubbery goo coming up from the bottom of the measuring cup– from where the “old” resin would have been… ) so it could have been something wierd from that– or it could have been because I think I kind of- heh heh– took the hardener and went squiiiiiiirt instead of the careful measuring of 12 drops– well it could have been either of these reasons and either way I’m not doing either of them again…

The result was definitely different than the other 2 nights I did it… Any ideas what I did wrong, based on that story? I at least believe it was one or both of those things.

I finally got up the nerve and fiberglassed him...

tragic slime.. well at least you can see where it was going...

I was way annoyed…

…you can also see the brand of resin/hardener I was using… And the hideous goo slopping off it onto the wax paper (totally normal, I believe)

…I had kind-of cheated and covered the back of his head with clay before glassing– seemed like it had a much better chance of turning out smooth… And it did get smooth- I was at least happy about that. There was alot of concerns (and there still is) about how round and “organic” you can get cardboard to be. Well at least I have this crappy picture to let us know that you can– with some work– get these two very anti-round and anti-smooth things- fiberglass and cardboard, to round out.

Next time, using fiberglass TAPE (avoiding fringes) and planning to intentionally glass such a large body only one part at a time. also, stay careful with the mixing of this crap… and the storage of this crap… probably most of the tools involve have to be one-use or stored outside the house 😛

Early concept illustrations

sketches for mask illustrations 2005

further sketches, from a notebook in Prague, 2005

When I first began living in Prague in 2005, I was working on learning the language, negotiating the new cultural environment, and being categorized as I never had been before: nationally. (All this and a love affair, an encounter with snow for the first time, and a blossoming of the language side of my brain). Everything was going more or less hunky dory… And then I began to be bugged by an idea I hadn’t worked seriously on for a long while… the Mask Inside, a character in a tarot deck I’d been imagining before. I had struggled with how to draw this creature, I had some kind of notion in my mind of what it looked like, but when it came out on paper only revealed how vague that concept was. It was in the middle of my many ups and downs in that environment, largely uneasy with my new and unasked-for category and disturbed by how willingly those around me took on their roles and labels as well, even be they deeply damaged and painful masks for the wearing, for the bearing and beholding, and I felt without a listener. The images started coming to me, in class, on the metro, in the snow outside of town and in the streets under steeples. I compulsively started drawing odd, mask-headed (not mask-wearing– mask-faced… masked in body, soul and mind) creatures in various poses– performing various surreal acts and being acted on as well, bent out of shape, living and dying, but mostly searching. And amongst all these creations there was a star– the Mask himself, or that’s his nickname (is he a he? why does he always drift into he-ness? this is a question of a swinging mind, unable to suspend itself for long above the he/she-thinking of the world, i think– even though this one has hardly any features which go either way… it’s the lack of she-ness– it is she who must proclaim herself, not he– he is the norm, he is the self without other alterating details, without the distortions away from this. This is one of the common dances of the swinging mind, and we have been propelled to think this way, I think, to the extent that even creatures such as the Mask get the tag… but the Mask is a tag-bearer after all, that is his role and he is highlighting that in us…) without much reasoning or explanation, there the Mask would appear, in a dress at the top of a ladder, in a veil running up to a door, pressing its inverted face up against a glass. And as soon as I could see these images, and started planting them on paper, then came flooding in the words, the stories and prose that accompanied them, as though the Mask were voicing them inside my head, clanging loudly in there to be written. The notebooks filled…