Low Rent Renaissance

The sculpture has been setting around a little while. I finally repainted her and mounted her on a board. The miserable heat outside is still forcing me to catch up on some inside projects. Her bed and guitar are not polymer clay but are cut from Luan wood. The mattress is a piece of Luan covered with linen (stuffed with a polymer filler) and coated with white glue and water for stiffness. I've been wanted to work on papercrete projects, but I swear it's either too hot (and humid) (heat + humidity = "heat index," which has generally a good ten degrees above the actual temperature), or it's raining. We've had heat index temps as high as 108. This has got to be one of the hottest, wettest summers on record down here in good old South Carolina. Only the mosquitoes are happy.

I took my webpage off line (money, money, money) but still wanted some photos of polymer sculptues available online. These are rather old. I'll be posting some more recent ones soon. The figures are generally 12 to 15 inches tall. They are made of Super Sculpy polymer clay over a 4 gauge copper wire armature (The arms/shoulders are a double strand of 8 guage aluminum wire which is mounted to the main armature with electric tape. The copper wire is stiff and strong enough to support a "tall" figure, and the aluminum is flexible and easier to pose.). They're painted with acrylics and mounted on stained pine bases. The heat down here has been incredible ("heat index," or "how it feels" due to the humidity has been as high as 108), and it's been keeping me inside and away from my papercrete projects. Hoping to get back at the papercrete soon.

http://papercreteparadise.blogspot.com/2009/06/papercrete-rcipe.html

I finally had the opportunity to work on the gazebo. Inclement weather, early sundowns, and other projects always seem to get the way of adding more papercrete to the structure. The other projects include renovating a 40 year old mobile home (I'm replacing the windows first (two down, ten to go), building a papercrete "sprayer" for use with an air compressor, and, of course, working on polymer sculptures. I'm hoping to post photographs of the mobile home (and new sculptures) as we progress. The trailer has been on our property awhile, and we were going to give it to the in laws to use for storage. But the county will not give us a permit to move a mobile home build prior to 1985 unless it's going to the land fill. Nor will they give a contractor a permit to rewire the thing. We felt it was just too valuable a space to pay someone to haul it to the dump, so we're taking it "off grid" and turning it into a studio. I'm hoping to cover the entire be...

I've been adding more papercrete to the fence/hardware cloth/chickenwire armature, using small, hand-mixed batches of the sculptue mix, which is cellulose insulation, Portland cement, and joint compound, with no sand. Once this dries I think the armature will be more substantial, and additional layers may be of the "construction" mix using the tow mixer, which will probably go faster. The poles at the entrance will be totems. Since they are upright (and I'll be working "against gravity") I'm going to try fastening the faces to the crete-covered poles with masonry glue and wood screws, and papercreting around them.