Midterm!

For our midterm, we were assigned to create sculptures out of either soap or spam. Soap represented subtractive sculpture, which is when you take away part of an element to create the sculpture (like carving wood or stone). Spam, on the other hand, represented additive sculpture: the process of building up an object (like working with clay). You can add or take away from it as much as you'd like; the medium is much more malleable.

I chose soap, mostly because the thought of working with spam was rather unappealing, but started encountering problems as I carved. Eventually, I had marred my soap so much that it became unsalvageable. So what to do? Either I could start over with new soap or try something different.

Finding out that Ivory soap puffs in the microwave, I nuked my fragments until they puffed into huge clouds of foamy soap. Then, I crushed the foam and mixed with a little water, kneading until I achieved a very crumbly paste. Finally I started sculpting!

It was kind of fun turning a traditionally subtractive medium into an additive one, but in the end, my frog started crumbling pretty badly. As he dried, the legs started to break away from his body, and at one point he lost an eyeball. I was able to moosh him back together with a bit of softened soap, but let's just say the car ride to school was not a happy event....

My Fail Frog!