thebeerbaron

This weekend has been very productive. I didn't get to the studio to work on my pottery, but I have been attacking the model quite a bit. With the toaster oven providing adequate heating, I was able to slather enough hot clay onto the foam buck to get somewhere. I also remembered to print off wheel templates at the office, so I now have wheel-shapes in the appropriate places. On Saturday, I took a nice walk through SoHo and stopped by the sculpture store for another stick of clay. This should be enough to hold me for quite a while.

Here's the buck with about two and a half sticks of clay on it (~4.25lbs). I've roughly shaped the clay as I've applied it, and you can see the wheels inside the fenders.
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I tried to make the last application of clay as smooth as possible so my tools won't skip around like mad when I go to carve it, but other than that, it's a very, very rough shape. I basically want more clay than I need, in all parts of the model. Much easier to carve this stuff away than to add more of it!

Here's the front-on view. I've been pretty good about keeping the face that will hit the mirror flat, but I know it won't be perfect. I think I have a plan for that, but for now, I'm just trying my best and winging the rest.
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Finally, here is the model after I've taken off some of the most egregious clay overloads. I think I actually cleaned up the wheel wells for the prior pics, but they're definitely done here. I've started to flatten out the side and give some shape to the shoulder that I've planned.
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The "wheels" leave a lot to be desired. The first one I cut out is a mess, the second one a bit better. But they're round (ish), which is what counts for now. I think I'll have to come up with something different for the photo session, but for now they'll do.

The tail end of my design is one of the least-developed parts of the design, but something I attacked first on the clay. And sitting here writing this, I think I realized where the inspiration is coming from. I don't know how it would work with the rest of the car, especially the aggressive face I have planned, but maybe I'll follow that inspiration.

I was sort of amazed at how quickly my rough carving created a curve that I liked quite a bit. It will get tweaked a bunch as the design progresses, but this highlights the reason I love working in clay - I can see how design elements can be tied together naturally. I will eventually carve some beautiful fender lines, and there will be an obvious way to tie them together. By running a carving tool over the same bits of clay time and time again the curve seems to form naturally, rather than being drawn-in in the most convenient way. I think it has something to do with the immediacy of the three-dimensional form, but clay is so much easier to get right than paper!

We're quickly approaching a point where this lump of clay is going to start looking like a design and my intention has never been to share that design with the public before it is submitted. Given the relative popularity of this blog, I'm giving a few thoughts to possibly potentially reconsidering that stance. My thought process is that I want the design to be very much my own and I don't need any input from the peanut gallery influencing my design. Everyone's a critic, but it's hard to know who has compatible taste or vision. There are some threads on this forum and over on GRM that I can't read anymore, because designers are batting around ideas, asking for input, and generally crowd-sourcing their designs. I don't want any part of that, and I don't want my design compromised by integrating things I think other people will like. "It's got to have a roof" or "Two headlights baaaad, four headlights good" are not ideas I want flitting around with the dust bunnies in my head.

Anyhow, that's a long way of saying I'm not sure what I'm going to do from here. I have plenty of posts in the works and can get along quite merrily with working on the design, talking about it here, and not sharing any pictures. Not sure how well that would go over though. I'd appreciate your thoughts on this!