Animal Assemblage Sculpture

Giovanni 11 June, 2019

This work of art is called "The Kelpie's Revenge". I thought that the title is very intriguing and would make many people want to study it even more. I also called it a kelpie because, in Scottish folklore, the kelpie is a malevolent creature that likes to drown weary travelers. The word "revenge" coupled with "kelpie" leads to an interesting name. However, a hippocampus, a Greek water-horse, would be more appropriate because it always has a fishtail while a kelpie only has a fishtail in some myths. I am still happy with the final product and the design was rather sturdy. I created the kelpie out of cardboard at first and later layered paint samples and magazine pages on top of it.

My inspiration, the kelpie from myths, was a fun project to build as an assemblage sculpture. After creating the body pieces out of cardboard, cut to the shape of my large sketch, I then glued them together to create the final body. I then went over the parts of the body to contemplate the overall design of the scales/texture. After thinking about the design for a while, I started to work on the scales by cutting them out of paint samples. I then glued them on by using mod podge and started working my way up from the tail. Closer to the upper body of the kelpie, I cut up the paint samples more erratically and slowly added magazine page cut up just as erratically. I used magazine pages that contained pictures of water to keep up with the water theme of the kelpie. I added those pieces on and moved on to the part of the mane. I used curved, cut up pieces of cardboard and glued them onto the body, using hot glue like the rest of the body, and placed them in different areas with different depth to make the sculpture look more real. My last part of the project was to cover the mane and other areas with blue tape to make the overall project look more finished. I then went over the entire work with mod podge to make it look more reflective and realistic (like the scales of a fish).

There were a few complications during the duration of the project. I had limited time for working on it, less time than I thought would be able to make my project look presentable. I ended up staying after school on two separate occasions to work on the final parts of my project. The glueing/mod podge work took longer than I had expected and took up a lot of my valuable time, time that I could have used on other parts of my project. However, the amount of time that I spent on it was just right and allowed it to look as good as I could have made it. By adding the extra tape to clean up the edges made the project look a lot better and made it seem a lot more finished than it could have looked without it. Overall, I am very proud of my work and I hope that this will not be the last time that I create a sculpture. I can't wait to try again and maybe next time, I can improve on my time management and will make an even better work of art.