I know you’re probably wondering where the heck did this come from!??

In our quest for cooler weather over the summer, we are thinking of traveling for around a month. What that means to me is I have to figure out a way that I can be both creative and productive without my normal tools at my disposal.

I had done some horse sculpting from live horses grazing in a pasture in front of me years ago at a friends ranch. I am not a rider and I have very little experience with horses in general, but they clearly speak to me in a way that surprised me!

I had this vision of a massive herd of horses positioned on a long dining table, envision looking at a herd of mustangs from an overhead view. I knew that whatever I was planning to work on had to be something I could do essentially in my lap, scale wise. So this crazy idea came into my head. Essentially this is me knitting😂! Something that I can work on portably without mess, everything fits into a tote bag and I still wind up with beautiful finished pieces in the end.

In the pictures above you can see how I actually created 18 armatures to begin with (because if I’m going to eat an elephant it has to be one bite at a time). As it happens, I have resin that has become too old to use due to it’s no longer being crystal clear. So I have decided to use that to cast the bodies of my horses and be able to lay in the aluminum wires to create head, tail and legs. My goal here is to use my time and materials efficiently so that I can move onto the fun part of the individual sculpting features quickly.

The clay that I use is actually an epoxy clay, so I don’t need a kiln and it hardens up overnight. It’s called Apoxie Sculpt from Aves Studios. They have a wide variety of epoxy sculpting and fixing products for all kinds of uses.

Once the resin cures and I have epoxied the head, tail & legs in place, I actually build up the armature using tinfoil wired on to create the large mass forms. Tinfoil is a wonderful sculpting material-cheap and easy to work with! Plus with lots of nooks & crannies the epoxy has lots of surface to bind to. After each horse is cured, I will finish the surface with different metal patinas (aged copper & bronze).

Check back to see how this progresses, remember - one bite at a time!!