Hand Sculpture

I started this project by making a mold of my hand with alginate and then filling it with plaster to make the sculpture. When the hand came out of the mold the fingers ended up breaking off because they were not in a fist. I wanted to make my hand into a sort of cup and not a fist because I though it would give me more options for ways to add on to my hand sculpture. I made sure to get all the bumps created by air bubbles off the hand and then I glued the fingers back on with super glue. Then I had to figure out how to add onto the hand by sketching out some ideas. I had one where the hand was holding flowers, one where it was holding buildings, and another one where water was in the palm of the hand and running onto the table. I ended up choosing the one with water and adding a koi fish to it because I thought it was the most interesting one.

I used white sculpey to make the koi fish and then added some orange on top to create the pattern that some koi fish have. I just used small black dots of sculpey for the eyes to make it look cute. For the water I used light blue sculpey that I put in the palm of the hand and had running down the side onto the table where I flattened it to make it look like a puddle was forming. I also carved some lines into the water to add more texture. I put the fish on top of the water and positioned it so it fit well in the hand and its tail went to one side. I decided to add some cattail plants next to the thumb. I made the plant stems around wire so they would stand up straight. While everything was baking I tried to paint the hand gray to make it look like a rock. I started out with watercolor that absorbed into the plaster but still added some color. I had to use watered down acrylic paint around the fingers because the glue was keeping the watercolor from absorbing into the plaster. The hand ended up looking kind of patchy because of this and it was darker than I wanted it to be but I think the uneven color made it look more like a rock. After the sculpey was done baking I added some acrylic paint to the water and the koi fish. The white sculpey had turned more yellow while it was baking so I painted white acrylic paint over it but I think that made it look kind of messy. I had to paint on the water because some of it had burnt slightly. I painted the water with sculpey gloss to make it look shiny and stand out from the rest of the sculpture. I had to wait to glue everything together because the plaster absorbed the watercolor which was stopping the glue from sticking.

The elements of design that I used in this sculpture are form, line, color, texture, and value. I used form because it is 3D and color is in all the sculpey and the way I chose to paint the hand a color that would make it look like a rock. Line, texture, and value are in the water because of the lines I carved into it to create texture and the different values of blue I painted on it. The principles of design that I used are movement, emphasis, unity, and pattern. There is movement in the way the water goes off the hand. There is emphasis on the fish because it is in the middle of the hand and it had bright orange on it. The pattern is on the fish because of its orange spots. There is unity because everything is being held in the hand. I really like how this sculpture turned out.