New Works in Progress

I always work on something when I'm in a booth at a show.  At Equine Affaire, with four 10 hour days to be in my booth, I get a decent amount of work done while talking to folks.  Sculpting during a show is a great way to teach people about the process of creating sculpture.  This time, I also had a digital picture frame doing a slide show of the Nanning sculpture being digitally enlarged.  That gave me even more educational material to show the process of going from idea to finished  bronze.

All that said, I started a small sculpture of an Andalusian stallion doing a levade (a 45 degree rear that's held for a few  moments - part of "haute ecole" or "high school" dressage.  It takes incredible strength to hold that position).  Several years ago, I was allowed to photograph the spectacular Andalusian stallion Alborozo at his home in Malibu.  His owner, Avi Cohen, put him through all his paces and let me take all the photos I wanted which was incredibly kind and generous of him.

When I started this sculpture at Equine Affaire, it was nothing but pipe, a board and some spools of wire.  I made an armature (metal support for sculpture) and started adding clay, building him up and working on his muscle masses.  I haven't started work on his legs yet, as you can see in the pics below.  The tail is short like that because the horse's tail is tied up this way so he won't step on it while performing.

This is where he is now:

My second new work in progress is a relief of a lovely mare that's an Arab/Welsh cross.  She's a palomino with a wide blaze.  I saw her pic on Facebook (she belongs to an online friend of mine) and asked if I could sculpt it.  She agreed and I started on it, but life got in the way and I had to leave it unfinished for quite a while.  Now I'm back at work on it and it's an intriguing puzzle to solve.  It's a difficult angle to do as a relief, which is one of the reasons I wanted to try it (silly me!).  This is one of those things we self-taught artists do - find a new challenge and fight our way through it as a way of increasing our skills.  So this piece will go through some serious cases of "the uglies" before it becomes the beautiful piece I see in my head.  Anyway, here she is along with the photo that inspired me.  It'll get better, trust me!

Other aspects of the art biz

Most of the time, I write about the creative process.  There are other aspects to the art biz than applying clay to a pipe and wire armature, and I'm going to talk about that today.

My daughter's logo for her business, Dancing Horse Farm, Lebanon OH (where I'm the Marketing Director/Webmistress/Newsletter editor, which keeps me VERY busy!) is beautiful and seemed like a natural design for jewelry.  With her permission (it IS trademarked, so it required permission), I started trying to find a way to make it into jewelry.  I knew her clients would enjoy it as jewelry and I also thought it would be a good way to promote the farm.

As you can see, it's very graphic in nature.  In fact, it was created (by my friend and fellow artist Marcia Van Woert) digitally.  I tried to sculpt it in various ways but had little to no luck (and no, I have no "digital" skills at all when it comes to creating art).

While I was in Oregon last July having the maquette of Nanning 374 digitally enlarged to life-size (the bronze will be installed in April, YAY!), I saw their 3-D printer at work (not on my piece - that was done with a different process).  The 3-D printer takes a scan or a digital image and prints it out in three dimensions in resin.  That's pretty darned cool! 

I asked if they could make jewelry blanks for me from this image and they said "sure" - and so they did.  They were GORGEOUS!  I sent them to a pewter caster and learned they were too thin to use to create the molds.  Rats!  The pewter place's cadcam guy re-did them at the proper thickness and jewelry was "born"! 

Now design ideas are running out of both my ears, and my daughter's in the same condition, LOL!  So far, we have two styles of earrings with the logo 1/2" wide, 3/4" wide pendants and zipper pulls, and I'm making beaded bracelets using the 1/2" charms.  They're all so beautiful!  And since they're pewter, they're AFFORDABLE! 

(Shown above:  Ball earrings, french wire earrings - both with 1/2" charm; 3/4" pendant; zipper pull using 3/4" pendant.)

All of them say "myDHF.com" (the farm's website) on the back.  The earrings don't have the texture shown above on the back, but they do have the lettering.  They're available at an introductory price of $10 for either style of earrings (ball earrings or french wire), $10 for a pendant with your choice of chain length from 16" to 24", $12 for the zipper pull.  There's $3 shipping/handling within the USA.  You can order them by contacting me (I use Lynda@myDHF.com for DHF business) or directly from the website at www.myDHF.com/dhf-jewelry.html.

It's SO EXCITING to see something like this become a reality, especially after trying for so long (literally years!) to create it.  And it's wonderful to see the excitement of those who know and love Dancing Horse Farm when they see and wear the jewelry. 

I'll be selling this jewelry (along with my sculpture) at Equine Affaire in my booth (#529-530 in the Bricker Building at the Ohio Expo Center - state fairgrounds) April 12-15, but the prices will be higher.  The current prices are introductory only.  If you want some DHF jewelry and want to get the best price, order it soon!

I love learning about all the ways art can be produced.  Learning about 3-D printing and cadcam stuff is really interesting to me, although I'll never conquer doing them myself.  There are SO many techniques and technologies that didn't even exist when I was a young'un.  Being an artist is endlessly fascinating . . .