Concentration Project #1

For this quarter each student got to chose their own concentration to focus on for the rest of the year. My concentration is mental illness and skulls to show those illnesses. This is my first project out of the five we will be doing. I used skeleton mold to make the skull out of plaster. After that I decided on some of the mental illnesses that I wanted to focus on. For my first sculpture I went with the illness depression. I feel that this is a big issue today and I wanted to incorporate that into my art. To represent depression and what it can feel like I decided to make black tentacles/vines. I made these out of black sculpy molded around tinfoil. To make them hard instead of moldable, I cooked them and then hot glued them to the skull. I then hot glued the skull to a piece of granite I found in the art room. With yellow and gray paint and water I made a color wash in order to make the skull look more vintage and rotten. I added blue acrylic paint to the areas that touched the vines and to the end of the vines. Blue is usually the color used to represent sadness which is what I'm trying to convey.

The vines represent depression in a physical form and how it takes over your thinking. The skull is being a person who has depression and has died from it. I arrange the vines in order for them to take up space in and around the skull. Because of this the sculpture has informal balance. The black vines act as leading lines taking the view all over the sculpture. Overall this sculpture turned out mostly how I had envisioned it. Getting the old looking wash onto the skull was hard because at first the color was too strong. I scraped it off and started over adding more water to the mix. The blue paint wasn't like I had thought I would do. It didn't fade out as much as I wanted it to.