Having been greatly disheartened by my earlier forays into miniature sculpture, I had been putting it off, but I figured it's now just over a month until Roll Britannia, so if I want a stall there I'd better get off my arse and sort it out.
So, I bought a blob of clay and a pot of kinda liquidy clay. It is bizarre stuff, basically microscopic particles of pure silver suspended in a mix of organic binder and water. You can squish it like Fimo, but it dries hard (yet brittle) in air then you fire it in a kiln and it comes out pure silver, but about 10% smaller then when it went in. Amazing!
I started with the skate. I wanted to make as close a replica as I can to a Reidell 265 boot with clay, then make the plate, axles and wheels out of sheet silver and tube, the old school jewellery way...
I still suck at sculpting, but the silver clay is much easier to work with than the Fimo, it turns out. After some squashing of clay and poking with sticks, I got to this stage:
It still looks much more like a random blob than a skate boot, so after a few more hours of work, I got it looking like so:
Which is a bit better, but I'm still not entirely happy with it. Having never used silver clay before, perhaps I should have started with something slightly less complicated.
Anyway, at some point I'm going to have to accept that this is as much like a skate as it's ever going to look. Maybe it will be better once it has the wheels on...?
I rented some studio space up in Amersham today to use their kilns and stuff to experiment, but am too knackered to write about it now. Also, my left wrist hurts and is swollen. Can you get RSI from sculpting tiny things...?
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