Animal Assemblage

For the animal assemblage project the idea was to choose and animal that would then be created using only recycled materials (things that would have other wise been discarded or disposed of). The idea for this project was to start to think and look at animals in a different way, by creating them out of things different than normal. This project was also about thinking about way that things can be created by reaching out of the normal materials. The idea of this project was to create a final sculpture that was interesting and created only by re-using materials.

For this project I wanted to create something on the larger scale, and I also knew that I wanted to do something with paper mache. I decided that I wanted to make a horse, to start this I began by drawing out a sketch with the measurements on a piece of paper (unfortunately my original drawing with the measurements and planning ended up as part of my project, possibly in the left front leg). Once I had the design and and idea of how I was going to create it I began to build. I started by building the barrel of the horse (the mid section of the body), by taking one piece of cardboard cut to the length and widths that I wanted and then added two more pieces of cardboard that slid into the barrel part to be the shoulders and hips. Once I had the skeleton of the horses body I began to crumpled up pieces of paper that I got from the print rooms scrap pile (All the paper has been printed on wrong and was other wise going to be thrown out). Once the body was complete I began to add the head and neck, I did this the same way with once piece of cardboard that fit in together through slats and then building up muscle and top line with crumpled paper. Next came the legs, I ended up sticking tubes of paper towels in the legs to get them to stand up and building up around those. At this point the horse wasn’t really looking like a horse so by using old news papers I covered the horse in paper mache. After that was completed I finished by adding a news paper tail and mane.

Over the course of this project I ran into a lot of problems, in the begging it was pretty much smooth sailing until I hit the legs, originally I wanted it to look like the horse was running up then realized it would be hard enough it get it to stand on four feet. I ended up starting to paper mache before it stood up and as I went along I used a lot of paper mache on the legs to help support it and it ended up standing up. I also couldn’t figure out how to add the mane and tail on without a lot of glue so I ended up cutting a hole for the tail and a long line on the neck so I could insert the mane. This project ended up taking much more time than I thought and I had to spend quite a lot of time on it. Over all I thought it was a really fun project and am really happy with the final product. His name is Frank.