I've put in so much work over the past week on the masks for the Salomé performance despite the fact that we have no role for them. Progress was fast at first but became slower and slower for the finer details. Many work-hours per mask put in so far. I could work on these for weeks, polishing sanding, layering to get a smoother and smoother result. I'd like to, my obsession for perfection demands it, but I don't have the time, and pursuing this goal would drive me to insane anguish. I must cope with and accept a 'good enough' result, set a time limit, stick to that, learn lessons, then move on.
Here is Step 1. Newspaper and garden wire, glued to the shop-bought mask (which is a plastic core covered with paper) with hot-melt glue:
Step 2: Sculptamold applied, a blobby gooey mix of plaster and soft paper shreds. A wonderful way to sculpt. This sets stone-hard in 24-hours.
Step 3: Some plaster bandages for the beard. You can see how messy everything is. It's very hard to keep it smooth, and even the tiny fragments of white become very hard, barely sandable, in under an hour. This creates problems if a smooth finish is desired.
Step 4: Painted with my own gesso mix of whiting (chalk), water and acrylic binder. This can be made thick as a filler, or watery like a gesso sottile type thin paint. I slapped this on thickly in about 3 layers. It dries very quickly but in a much nicer way than acrylic paint, not skin-forming, so it can be managed and moved, a really pleasing way to paint and fill, unlike the frustration of acrylic paint. This soft and beautiful material is a lot easier to sand than Sculptamold. Sculptamold is so hard to sand that power tools are the tool of choice.
Part 5: Hours of intricate sanding, and another smoother and thinner layer of gesso, then more sanding. Dust everywhere.
A close up of the texture on the hand. 30 days of sanding and layering could make it as smooth as anything, but I don't have the time. It would lose the character and rawness of the sculpting and I might end up up wanting to re-add some of the pits and dents to it give back the character it now has. Thinking about it, I thought that a dream idea of a hand should be the goal of this object, a hand as imagined by the wearer, rather than a 'realistic' hand.
And a look at the Nietzsche mask, I worked on all three at the same time. This was a lot more difficult. The pose is less realistic, unachievable with real hands, and its weight meant creating a support structure to hold it while it dried. The tennis ball (I had no other ball options) had messy surface fur, and everything was rushed on that day of record heat.
I needed a lot of power-tool work on it after that stage and I was unhappy with many aspects of the positioning and general look. After the power-sanding, gesso, sanding, gesso, sanding, it looked like this:
