The Degree Show

The degree show opened earlier this week and we had the private view on Tuesday.

To see how I made the tree piece click here and here.

And these are the deets for the house; walls, bricks, interior, paving, porch, appliances, front bedroom, rubbish bin, roof, back bedroom, details

Our business cards are all kept together in these specially made pigeon holes.

Here's Natalie modelling mine.

My work seems to be getting a fair bit of attention. I love seeing people walk around the entire house and peer into each window.

And so that you guys don't feel left out, here's a video showing my work so you can view it as if you're there!

(If you're one of my friends or family that are coming to see the show, don't watch this video. Spoilers people!)

The other artist who have work in this room are Clare Mills, Andy Reeve, Jon Jensen, and Will Reid.

Andy has already sold two of his piece. One of them was to John Hurt.

You know, famous actor John Hurt. He's the new provost for our university.

When he looked round he didn't seem to interest by my work, as he was too busy figuring out which of Andy's he was going to buy (the most expensive!).

But his wife had a good look at my work!

If you happen to be in Norwich the degree show is on until Tuesday 3rd July.

Degree show tree progress

You've seen the tree I'm making for my degree show piece so now I'll show you some progress on the rest of the piece.

The tree slots into a hole in a piece of wood which is attached to a piece of MDF.

The MDF is 45x55cm which is the same size as the top of my plinths.

To make the mound which the tree sits atop a scrunched up newspaper around the block of wood and then papier mached over the whole thing to create a gradual slope. 

Then I put the whole thing in the airing cupboard to dry.

Unfortunately all that water and glue from the papier mache-ing caused the MDF to warp. All four corners were bending upwards.

Mega annoying.

To try and fix this I coated the underside of the MDF with watered down PVA and then balanced it on a roll of masking tape. I put stacks of heavy books on each corner to pull them down.

I did this a few times and it has helped, but it's still not perfect.

I painted the mound first with a mixture of brown paint, glue and dried tea and coffee.

Yummy.

I used this mixture to build up an area around the tree.

Then I painted over some of the brown with green as a base colour for the grass.

For the grass I bought some grass scatter from Ebay from a seller that specialises in model railway supplies.

Up until now I'd managed to avoid using supplies like this, but I couldn't think of an alternative way to make the grass.

Then I started making some tyre tracks.

Stay tuned to find out what that's about.

Degree show tree

In addition to the house I'm making for my degree show, I'm also making a second piece that features a tree.

I've made a tree before and I was pretty proud of it -someone even bought it- which is why I thought I'd be able to successfully make another one.

Confirmation on that statement is still pending.

Here's how it's going so far.

I started with a lot of wire wrapped round a piece of wooden dowel which then branches out into..well..branches. 

I bought a whole heap (yeah, that's a technical term of measurement...) of Sculpey for this project, but only ended up using a quarter of it. More Sculpey for me!

I covered all the wire in Sculpey and I added some foil around the trunk before adding the Sculpey to bulk it out a bit.

Then, as you may know, Sculpey needs to be put in the oven to harden.

My tree only just fit in the oven! I had to take all the shelves out and was then worried that the tree would tip backwards into the flames.

The required time is between 15 and 30 minutes but when I opened the oven door after 6 minutes to check on it, a lot of smoke came out. So I thought I ought to abort the mission.

The 6 minutes was actually enough time to harden most of the branches but the trunk was still squidgy.

I put the tree back in the oven twice more with the door slightly open, but the trunk didn't get any harder.

So I gave up and went straight to painting it.

As I was painting it some of the bigger branches near the trunk started to fall apart a little bit.

Slight panic, but then I grabbed some small strips of newspaper and some watery PVA glue and papier-mached the tree Neil Buchanan style. 

The Sculpey is still squidgy under the newspaper, but at least it's not falling apart and I was able to finish painting it.

I'm not sure if the colour's exactly right yet, it's looking a bit grey, but trees aren't exactly brown. I like the texture I've got going on. 

Inside the house

 Initially I wasn't going to bother too much with the inside of the house I'm making, but after being encouraged by my tutor and my family, and then getting a bit carried away, the inside it starting to take shape.

This is the ground floor with the hall, kitchen and living room.

View through the porch window of the stairs.

The front door.

Uh-oh, the glass has been smashed!

The view into the living room.

I still need to add furniture.

The kitchen.

I thought it would be cool to print the wallpaper using another hand made rubber stamp.

Cos it's not like I have tonnes of other things on this house to work on...

A house doesn't need a roof if it has hand-printed wallpaper, right?

House progress

My house is taking shape.

Windows and doors really do make all the difference.

All the brickwork took 3 days to complete!

I made a new brick stamp as my first one wasn't the right scale.
And this one has more individual bricks so it covers more ground. 

Here's the house at the moment.

It's my biggest miniature yet!

Bringing in some help

Making an entire miniature house is a pretty big task so I called in some help.

"Goooooooood morning Fine Art family!"

Pretty soon the whole gang was there!

Michael was helping out with the window frames.

The girls were just posing because the interiors aren't ready to be worked on yet.

Ty and Paul are chilling on some of the window frames that I spent forever cutting out and painting.

I'm slowly making progress with this house but it's going to be a while until it's time to move that bus.

Man, I love Extreme Home Makeover.

And so it's begun...

...my degree show piece.

Or at least thinking about it a lot.

And this is what I'm thinking.

Two plinths. One with a house and one with a tree.

Stuff is going to be going on in both of them, but it's a bit too early for spoilers.

These models are miniatures of miniatures.

Mindplosion!

They're scaled down versions of what I ultimately want to make, just so I can give my tutor an idea of what I have in mind.

I tried to make these models exactly to scale, a 10th of the actual size they're going to be.

It involved a fair bit of planning.

And some maths.

But I actually quite enjoyed that.

As for the content of the pieces, I've been thinking about the last two minutes of this Roswell episode and have been watching a lot of Dateline NBC