SELF-DIRECTED UNIVERSITY PROJECT
For my Final Minor University Project, I planned to design and create a Phoenix in a stylised and individual way. Instead of producing a stereotypical Phoenix, which would look bird-like, or as though it was on fire, I wanted to create a Phoenix that looked as though it was born from the ashes, containing a hot centre that had transformed to rock, shards and crystals.
The Phoenix sculpture was designed to hypothetically be presented in an exhibition alongside other sculptures of mythological creatures that symbolised the 4 main elements; fire, water, air and earth. To start building and developing the context behind the sculpture, I designed and modelled the exhibition space in Google SketchUp to visualise how it would be presented and what would be alongside this in the exhibition.
Developing this idea, I went through different design processes. Firstly, I used Alchemy (an open drawing project) to generate ideas and a new way of looking at shapes and character composition. For this, I created my own 'crystal' shape templates that act as the basis for the designs. Each character and concept is made up of these individual shapes overlayed together in a random sporadic fashion. Altering the effects affected the outcome of each composition and generated different, unique concepts.
This then progressed onto sketching bird forms, taking most reference and influence from eagles and combining this with the crystal forms previously created. I developed and finalised these drawings to create my final images, which were used to gauge the scale to begin the construction processes.
For the sculpting stages, I created the wings using Chavant NSP Medium Modelling Clay, sculpting each shard and crystal individually onto 3mm MDF templates. These were again moulded and casted individually, and attached onto a metal frame to form the wings.
The main body was again, sculpted using Chavant clay onto a metal armature, moulded using Supersil 25 Silicone with Thixotropic additive to thicken. It was then reinforced with a fiberglass 5-part shell. It was casted with Fastcast to create a robust shell, which was filled with additional Fastcast to reinforce the stability of the sculpture.
The finished wings were attached onto metal rods and then slotted into place into holes in the body. All elements were painted up separately and then assembled.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING!
Keep up to date with my work on my Facebook Page
and if you like this,
please press the button below.
