Plaster Hand Sculpture

For this assignment, the task was to make a plaster sculpture of your own hand. For this we took the plaster and mixed it so that we could make it just right to place our hands into. I chose to use my right hand and make it into a fist. After I put my hand in the plaster, I waited a couple of minutes so that it could dry a little bit and so it could engrave all the detailing of my hand. After that, I took my hand out and then filled the empty hold of my hand with the plaster filling. Next, after waiting a couple of hours for it to dry, I took the hand out and let it dry until next class.

My ideas I had for my plaster hand was to make the hand holding either a balloon or flowers since my hand was in a fist. After deciding for a bit, I finally chose to create my hand holding a balloon. I chose to do the balloon because I wanted to try something different and I usually always have flowers in my artwork. The materials I used for this was sculpey, wire, aluminium foil, and watercolor paint. I started off my drilling a hole into the bottom and top of my fist so then they would break through and connect so I could have the wire go through. Then I took the aluminum foil and crumpled it to create a balloon like shape. After that I used purple and white sculpey to create a light purple for the color of the balloon. Again with sculpey, I used more white sculpey to create the string of the balloon to wrap around the wire. Once both the balloon and the wire were completely wrapped in sculpey, I baked them for 10-15 minutes. Asd they were baking, I used watercolor paint to create a skin tone and red paint to add nail polish to the thumb. Once the sculpey was done baking, I glued the wires into the hand and attached the balloon onto the string.

Overall, I am proud of the way my plaster hand came out and I like the idea and the creativity. I didn't have many problems with it at all. However, I did come to a problem when I realized if I was going to put sculpey around the wire, I would have to cut the wire in half because it would not be able to fit through the hand. So I cut the wire in half and glued each piece to the top and bottom of the fist. The only other problem I had was that it took almost a whole class for me to mix the purple and white sculpey for the first time, which wasn't that big of a deal. Besides those minor inconveniences, I am very pleased with my project and I would just make sure to mix the sculpey differently so that it mixes faster next time.