Aaaarr! Treasure!

there is a treasure hunt up in Sonairte soon. My wife asked me to make some treasure for the hunt. I was going to make little animals and insects and leaves. But nothing says treasure like a pile of gold coins! Each coin has a flower on the back then on the other side there is an animal, insect, leaf, tree or seed pod. Sonairte is an ecology centre so it makes sense to have the treasure made up of things that are important to the environment. The coins are made from plaster with gold acrylic paint(non-toxic) but in the future I would like to come up with some simple way to make coins from wood and stamp them with the images or burn or cut the images in. some process that I could hand off to anyone else and they could do it easily. maybe a machine!
These were done quite quickly, I think next time I'd like to sit down and think about the links between the various elements on the coins and have a specific reason for each one to be there.

 I love the look of the coins. They taught me a few things in terms of material, manufacture, tools and calluses!

 

A is for awesome

The top one is a small plaster medallion that I made as a thank you to my wife for being awesome while I have been sick. the bottom two are the old symbol that fell off our car and the new more fun one I have made. now where's that glue?

Back to doing some art

After having been sick for a while I finally got back to making art. Wanted to try sand drawing, so on Monday I headed to the beach with a friend and we waited with rakes in hand while the tide receded. We had around four hours to work(okay, play) and when we were done we went up the top of the cliff and when we got to the spot we could see the beach from we both gasped. The drawings came out so well and were so easy to do. Definitely doing sand drawing again! I was sitting down the beach another day and picking through the stones near me and found a nice small Mudstone pebble. Then a few "tools" of concrete and hard stones. So sitting there for a while I ground out the shape I wanted from the stone, using the concrete shaped to points and curves as files, until I had the basic shape that I wanted and then used my penknife to cut out the detail. It was only a small doodle of a piece but, again, so satifying. The piece itself is inspired from a guys work on deviantART, really lovely torso work in stone and wood, very often made from quite thin pieces of wood or stone. On Friday I finally went to dip my toe back into the studio. I headed there with bigger intentions than actually happened but it was nice to start and finish something in the studio. No matter how small. I began work on an idea I spotted in my notebooks when flicking through them on Monday looking for ideas for the beach art. It was a collection of simple stylised faces in three different styles. Using a few leftovers from the plasterwork I do as a day-job I blanked out the three faces. And then began making texture on each blank. Three textures. Skin, stone and wood. I was very happy with the stone texture. Using a small wire brush like a hammer I beat the plaster until it looked like rough stone. It reminds me of Portland which isn't too surprising given that plaster(gypsum) isn't too far off being Portland stone. I had intended to work on the stylised faces on each piece quite a lot, instead it seemed to work better to use a standard mark for all the faces. Really enjoyed making everything I did this week. May the next week have more! Plenty of ideas to work on anyway!