Building a Transformer out of a skull part 3

So the end of 2014 is getting really close and I am thinking of how to fill my time making sculptures. I have always many ideas and said to myself to focus a bit more on the type of sculptures I have, because otherwise people don't know what I am about as an artist. Well, so I have been thinking about old projects and how to do them better or slightly different and come back to me making my first Transformer.

So this was many years ago and based on Optimus Prime; a robot that transforms out of a lasagne package and back. Two years later I tried to make one out of a real sheep skull, but failed. It started with many pieces of skull:

Eventually, the project failed on joints that kept breaking away from the bone, but the last few days I spend some time, not too much, with my old first generation Transformers and this idea is getting very tempting again! So 2015 might see a Transformer that transforms out of a real sheep skull, but it is going to be a frustrating journey without doubt!

The typical looking back looking forward....

Like everybody else at the end of the year, you look back and forward, but I also think about the plans I had for this year and how I have lived up to my plan. Sounds all very systematic and thorough, but it isn't. Generally my plan consists of something like: Try and get 2 exhibitions and do a couple of fairs and create a new paint style or something. This year my plan was even more simple: focus on the types of sculptures I have and anything I get done is bonus. Why? Because the main plan was to prepare for fatherhood and take care of baby and mother when 'it' arrived. So that is why it has all been a bit slow and why I have only done Strummercamp, Kendal Comic Festival and a short exhibition in the Manchester Climbing Centre.

I am pleased to have progressed on the bike part and bone sculptures and to have restored to key pieces like the Wile E Coyote 2D sculpture and the Spongebob Fossil. So I stuck to my plan of not making new types of sculptures, because otherwise it all gets very random, I think. I think people should be able to easily recognize what I make and I already make so many different types of art: Skulls, Urban Scoundrels, 2D sculptures, drawings, Fictional Fossils, Fridge magnets, Bike parts and bones sculptures and other mixed media sculptures.

It is difficult to stay on 'just' these types of art, because I have loads of other ideas which can be great, but.... aahhh! People who know me als know I have often been busy making a board game..., I am also making t-shirts, cards, would love to make a calendar and this is al next to the many ideas I have for new types of sculptures. Pfff...the more I think about these, the more I talk about these with others, the more ideas I get.

So what shall I do for next year? Still not sure, at least I want to make more bone and bike part sculptures and do a few more fairs than last year. For the rest, I might indulge myself to make something new, but all is still more limited while taking care of my only living sculpture I have ever made! We will see, I won't stop that is for sure!

Where do you get your bones from?

There are two things I always hear from people when they see my work at fairs, festivals or exhibitions:
They will first mention; 'I have never seen anything like this before' when they move onto the question; 'Where do you get your bones from'? First, I thank you all for the first comment! I consider that to be a great compliment, because I don't like making what other people have made! I want to answer your question in this blog post.

Unlike some of you that wonder whether I go out to kill innocent animals in the wild, steal dead animals from Abattoirs or simply eat loads of meet to keep the bones while making the local butcher rich….I just collect the bones in the wild when the animal has already died. Big or small I use both, but  different sizes means different ways of collection in my case and will explain how I deal with the small animals this time.

I often go out running or cycling and if you keep an eye out you will see a lot of small animals dead on paths and roads. Most of them, especially in very busy urban areas, will be quite useless because half of the bones are broken by cars driving over them multiple times. Key is to find roadkill that hasn't felt the hard side of our society's favourite mode of transport to often: How flat is it? If it still has an 'natural' shape, does it still have eyes or an intact rectum? If yes, it probably died in the last 24 hours and is probably not hit very often. Small animals like this will loose a lot of hard material like nails, vertebrae and teeth very quickly. So I often collect the whole animal and place it in my garden so I can control its decay and make sure I get most of the bones.

This summer I find a grey squirrel while out on the bike and took it home. Interesting to see how quickly flies came on it.

On the same they when this squirrel died

On the same they when this squirrel died, took extra care to trap the tail bones, hope it works!

After one and a half week where you already see lots of maggots in its head, no those are not teeth!

I didn't have time to clean it, but it is ready now to strip it down into bones and I will still expect some flesh turned into 'leather' and lots of fur, but besides that it should be clean of any other soft tissue. Then I will keep it exposed in a tray for the winter to come in a sunny place to prevent algae growing in the bone. If you want white bones, make sure you are quick enough from this stage to separate the bones from the tissue and remove them from the soil, because the soil will give it a brownish colour. But if that happens I can always make a fridge magnet installation on my fridge or like I did two years ago; split them an spread them around the city as an easter hunt if you have a hare or rabbit:

Still alive!

I have been an bit busy with other stuff lately, so this blog has gathered some dust over the last few months. I did do some work my art, like showing my work at the Kendal comic book festival, which was really nice! Sold  more work than expected and had a lot of nice comments on my work! Unfortunately, I am still busy with non art related stuff and really push it to finish new work and currently busy on an commission which is really started to look good!

I won't be doing the normal batch of Christmas fairs, because I don't have the time this year, but I am planning new events for next year. If you want to buy something for Christmas, I always have sculptures 'in stock' but I can also squeeze in a request here and there, just send me an Email!

Stay tuned!

Bryonosaurus Colepiokite fossil

I have finished a new fictional fossil! This time one that is based on a character of my own imagination, which means an animal that has never existed, but it does in my mind and now it is there in real life. So it did exist….because I have a fossil here!
So what is this new character? It is a Bryonosaurus; a Dinosaur with feathers, same size as a pigeon, but it can't really fly. Well, just a little bit, because it uses the hands as a kite to propel itself over land and water. It has big hands with lots of feathers and long skinny arms, shorter legs and big feet and is a carnivorous animal that likes to eat small frogs.

The name comes from on of the first feathered animals the Bryonosaurus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronosaurus
The second part of its name is based on its skill of kite surfing, mainly the hands that form the kite. 'Colepio' is old Greek for knuckle, because the first remains of this animal was found long time ago, but this specimen is in much better state.

In this fossil only one of its typical features is clearly visible and those are his long arms. The bones of the hands and feet were a bit lost in time. The skull is very nicely preserved for us.

My next sculpture is probably going to be a commission and the first of its kind, so stay tuned!

Exploring the thoughts behind the ideas for my sculptures

I have recently spend some time reflecting on what I have made in the past 5 years. I often concluded that my sculptures are pretty innocent creatures, although freaky, and that My more political thoughts never really properly got in to them, with some exceptions though.

But if I look at de various types of sculptures I make, I discovered that subconsciously I didn't just like them in a random way. It all was environment and waste focussed, but very very difficult to see. I noticed the urge to create animals. The urge to use natural materials. The need to adapt animals to subconsciously add an evolutionary theme. So for a lot of them I won't be claiming so higher explanation about how I view the world, but I do want to use this post to describe what was going on in my head.

If I take my first sculptures, the are all animal crossovers and a lot of them with robotic parts. I have always liked that contrast. Not really sure why, but might figure that out at some point. So animals are big. I easily could have used humans, but no. I found that I actually don't rate humans as important for me as other people might do.
I have also used a lot of bones and that has a clear death theme in it, but more the urge to explore the things of real life you normally don't see. I have always had the urge to do the opposite thing. Sometimes to show people alternatives or just to show something different. My scavenger mentality did really help with that as well. I have always picked stuff up as a child and was always thinking it would be a shame to throw things away. Here comes the urge to use waste. For me using waste goes further than just reusing things. I very strongly believe not to use more than I need, even if it doesn't have an effect in the environment. It sometimes is an obsession, but not a very clear one.
With the fictional fossils, I am really diving into the imagination and I found that fossils somehow feel like the best way to prove that characters of my imagination, animals and the like, were alive and not just a sculpture. Looking back, this is a nice mirror for all the fake lives we are creating ourselves online. We use our imagination and try to bring it alive as much as we can.

So far e quick blurp on this. I might come back with more evolved thoughts...

Price setting in art

The pricing of an object of art is a very common question. Every artist struggles with it and it wraps around to underlying questions:
1 Do I calculate a price and if yes, how?
2 Would this price be realistic for the market?

So you think you go about and create a very realistic price for your artwork on which you spend a numerous hours on and think you will definitely will be able to sell it. You start with question number 1:
There are many ways to calculate a the price of a work of art. You grab your costs and add an hourly rate to it. The costs can just be your materials, but some may include everything in it like your costs for having a website. Hourly rates can vary a lot as well and when picking an hourly rate you soon start to wonder what is a fair rate and that is just before you drop into the second question:

The second question is when you start to research what other similar artworks go for, or more accurately; what other artists ask for their work. So you check artworks of similar size, quality and type.  Then you realise that the prices vary a lot, but that their is a rough baseline. But within that base line an artist can still ask 3 times as much as a different artist with very comparable work. The clue partly lies in the word 'ask'. Everybody can ask something, whether they get it is something very different, but that is only part of the explanation.
The other part is a lot more important an completely ruins both questions you have just been researching, because when you were doing that research you did discover artworks actually being sold for 20 times more than the baseline of prices for a similar work of art; quality, size and type. Off course you realise that you might have gone wrong somewhere because it is difficult to asses the quality side of it. But that said, if you make landscape paintings you probably know a bit how to pull of a landscape painting and you wouldn't be judging the creation of a bronze sculpture or an installation.
I think it is safe to assume that there are a lot of artworks sold for a lot more money from one artist where similar quality artwork from another artist could have been bought by spending 10 times less.
How is that possible? Well, I think because the product, art, is very hard to judge by the average buyer. There are only a few people that can assess the quality of various different type of artworks in a good way, for the rest there are loads of people that pretend they do. So a lot of the judgements are more based on opinion, so you as a buyer might as well use your opinion when buying art, but that is where it goes wrong and where you get these freak prices. The prices go wrong in two ways: People often not just buy an artwork because they like it, but also whether their friends, perhaps more art minded friends, will like it as well. So they will follow other peoples opinions, presented as quality assessments, and buy accordingly. The second reason the prices go wrong is that a lot of people will also buy art as an investment, so they will follow where ever the market takes them. Weirdly, with all the difficulty of judging art on quality, for an art investment it isn't important to buy quality as much as you would expect, but whatever grows in price, so more the perceived quality.

You might have read this and think; what is 'wrong' about those prices, it is just how the market works. Yes, it is, but I have always had difficulty to except people behaving in a certain way not because it is better, but because everybody does that. Same with this. If one celebrity buys an artwork from artist x, then suddenly that artist can slowly push the prices up 10 fold. His quality hasn't gone up 10 fold and there are loads of other artists that would make the same art but didn't come across that celebrity to sell to.

I often get comments that I should ask more money for my sculptures, because x and y will ask the same price. But the question is always for me; do I sell it at that price? You can also wonder whether a lot higher price would create a better perceived quality, but to pull that off you need to be showing your work at the right places and does are hard to get into without someone influential.

I just hope one day that I do become a bigger name and that the works I have sold to people that appreciate my work, simply because they like it, will see their sculptures rise in price, but that they will still keep it!