Alginate Hand Sculpture

For this project we were tasked with making a sculpture out of a hand mold that we casted using alginate. This design could be anything as you were allowed to paint it, put items on it and figure out how to make it into something that is creative. When I originally thought of what I wanted to do with my hand sculpture I thought of making a mineshaft out of it. Since the inner part of my hand clasped together looked almost like a bowl, I thought it could be the inside of a cave and for the base I could grow crystals. But that ended up being a bit difficult as it would require me to figure out how to make the hole in my hands bigger and to attach little bits of elements. So in the end I decided to make my hand look scaly and have a snake stick out of it almost making hand look as if it is being transformed by the snake it is holding.

The materials I used were quite simple, I used acrylic paint for the green base. Cardstock paper and glue for the scales and basic clay for the snake.

I first started by painting the base of the hands green to resemble that jungle ish kind of environment that snakes tend to usually live at. Then I started covering the hands with blue and pink scales because I thought those colors would really go well together. After I was done glueing down the scales on the hand I then carved a snake which I little by little attached to front and back of the hands. I had difficulties with this at first as the clay would sometimes fall off because it was too long so I had to hold it in place so that it could harden. Finally after the snake was done drying off I painted it blue and pink together because I thought those colors would make it unique and stand out from any other ordinary snake and it matched the exotic colors of the scales that I used for the hands. One it was done I thought it would be cool to add some brown sticks which sort of bring together the environment a little and I was done. This was a relatively difficult assignment for me because with the way my hands turned out I had a hard time thinking of what I wanted to make out of them on top of being behind on my other work which needed attention so I thank you Ms. Medsker for your continued patience for getting this done.