Starting a horse sculpture

Because I won First Place and Purchase Award with "Eleanor" at the Scottsdale Artists' School Best & Brightest Show this year, I received a scholarship to the school for a workshop.

This year I had decided that I wanted to branch out from purely portrait and figurative works to include animals and wildlife. It's always a good idea to try to learn and be exposed to new techniques and styles whenever possible too.

With that in mind, I chose a horse sculpting workshop by Rod Zullo. It featured new techniques in armature building, making a portable sculpting stand to take on location and sculpting using silhouette.

He recommends Jmac Clay in brown but as I had a lot of Jmac Tan in stock, I chose to use that instead. The bonus was that the cream color of the tan didn't absorb the Arizona heat like the dark brown clay does, so my work didn't melt and sag in the heat like the other clay. Happy accident. I simply like the lighter clay because it is easier on my eyes.

We started by building a simple but sturdy armature and then went on location for observing and sculpting horses from life. We were very fortunate to go to a lovely estate with some world-class horses to sculpt from.

After blocking in a simple straight silhouette form of the horse we selected a pose of our choosing and went to work fleshing out the work. While the photos may make the work look larger, this piece is about 22" long, I think. It is currently being crated and shipped from Scottsdale to my studio in Fort Collins so I can continue working on it soon.

Eleanor wins 1st Place Sculpture and Purchase Award Scottsdale...

"Eleanor" was chosen by the judges as First Place in Sculpture for this year’s Best & Brightest Show at Scottsdale Artists School. It was also chosen by the school to be this year’s Purchase Award.

This honor is especially poignant for me because I received a scholarship from the Scottsdale Artist's School to attend a Sandy Scott workshop in 2015 and while there I would sneak into the school early just to peruse the halls, admiring the works on permanent display, photographing them with my iPad and thinking that I would love to have one of my works in those halls one day.

I am grateful that "Someday" came today.

Show opens Friday 1/8/2016 with a free and open reception from 5-7pm and runs through 2/27/2016.

Scottsdale Artists’ School
3720 North Marshall Way
Scottsdale, AZ 8525

Life sized clay study of Least Bittern Bird

This is a life-sized clay study that I started at Sandy Scott's bird workshop at the Scottdale Artists School.

Sandy and the rest of the class were workin on an Arctic Tern but I chose to go with a closed-wing sculpture as I was going to be taking this back to my studio for further work and needed to be able to easily dismantle from the board and armature and box up as carry-on for my flight back to Colorado. Working with a pose like this made it possible to transport rather easily with minimal damage.

I also chose this bird as it is a wader and I had some ideas for placing it within reeds and wanted to work out my own ideas for casting and basing.

This sculpture measures about 12.5" tip to tail and 5.5 wide and is sculpted in Chavant's Le Beau Touche oil based clay.

Bufflehead Duck study in Chavant Clay at Scottsdale Artist School

I was awarded a scholarship to attend the workshop of my choice at the Scottsdale Artists School located in Scottsdale, Arizona.

As my plan was to branch out into wildlife sculpture this year it was hard to choose between so many excellent instructors. Ultimately I settled on the Sandy Scott workshop because she was going to emphasize working with custom armature building, anatomy and artistic reasoning. All of these things, plus Sandy's disciplined approach to her work and life-long achievements were areas that I was keen to work on.

I wasn't disappointed. Sandy was well organized and her partner, Trish, was also there to help and give her input into mold-making and casting tips - so valuable when working on sculpture ideas to find the best and most viable ways of working to see it through from conception to completed foundry casting.

We spent a good deal of time learning bird anatomy, aerodynamics of flight, behaviors, researching and then armature building. What is especially nice is that everything I was learning relating to birds for this specific course will easily translate into mammals and humans when sculpting other subjects.

Sandy was generous in sharing tips on research, work methods and materials and sculpting tips. She was just as receptive to learning new tips from any students who had things to contribute as well and the whole class had a very nice rapport. We began by working on armature building and sculpting a study of a Bufflehead Duck. It was a great exercise and I enjoyed the process. Being a workshop, however, I was there to learn and not take home a prize - so at the end of class I cut apart and recycled this study. I'm looking forward to applying what I learned in new sculpture works very soon.

Armature was 1/2" plumbing pipe with t-bar, bailing wire and foil. The clay is Chavant Le Beaux Touche (regular not High Melt)

The workshop ran from Saturday through Wednesday from 9am to 4pm and the building, grounds and staff were wonderful. I will definitely be returning for additional workshops in the future and keeping Scottsdale in mind for teaching in my future, too.