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Description

Click here to see an alternate view of this same piece.

My inspiration:

Every year when I was growing up, my family and I would visit my grandparents in Florida during spring break. This was, in some ways, the best week of my year, and I have ever after cherished those times with my grandparents, especially considering they both passed away during my young adulthood. Since they lived in a condo with a view of the ocean, one thing I loved doing with them was collecting seashells on the beach. So many years, I would return to my landlocked home with a new batch of shells from my favourite place. Over the years, I put these shell collections into decorative jars, and they’ve traveled with me whenever I’ve moved. These shells hold a special place in my heart because they remind me of some of the best times of my childhood with my most fondly beloved relatives.

In recent years, I have felt a particular affinity for seahorses. (They’re probably one of my top 20 favourite animals.) There’s something in me that just wants to make seahorses out of my art, and I think I need to keep making seahorses in various forms until I get all the seahorses out of my system. So, when the opportunity for this contest came up, what other subject could I choose but the one that is so filling my heart these days? Thus, I landed on my idea: a seahorse made entirely out of seashells; a creature of the sea represented by objects from the sea.

My process:

When I saw this contest, I thought of—and decided against—various other mediums before I decided to use my seashells. They were pretty and immediately accessible. I had hand-picked them from the beaches of Sanibel Island ( renowned for being the best shelling beach in the whole world), and they weren’t really doing anything in those decorative jars except looking pretty. So, I asked my husband—also an artist—what kind of glue he recommended to affix seashells to one another, and he—from his own collection of art supplies—found and lent to me a tube of silicone glue.

As I sorted through my personal shell collection, I realized that—although some of the shells I already possessed would be useful for forming the larger sections of my sculpture—I didn’t have enough tiny shells. So I had to go to my local craft store early in August to purchase a small bag of super-tiny shells, which had the perfect sizes and shapes and types for the detailed parts of my sculpture that I knew I would need.

Shells spread over my art table, sorted, and selected, I set to work gluing one to another to start forming the different parts of the seahorse’s body. I had to do this in stages, as I had to wait for the glue to fully bond 24 hours before attaching the next few seashells to the form I was creating, so it took many days of gluing and waiting before the various piles of shells started to vaguely resemble a seahorse.

Once the seahorse was all glued together, I coated it in resin. I knew long before I started this project that I would want it sealed in resin, in an effort to give it as much strength as possible. But using resin was extremely nerve-wracking, because it was the first time I’d ever worked with resin. I was terribly nervous about getting the right ratios of the two parts measured accurately and mixed thoroughly, and I knew I had a very limited working time before the liquid resin would start to set and harden. My hands were shaking as I painted the gloppy resin onto my seashell seahorse, and then hung it dangling on an apparatus I made out of wire and aluminum foil to suspend it so that the fresh resin now on the bottom half of its body would dry without adhering to whatever it would have otherwise been resting on. Five or six hours later, it was time for the 2nd coat, or rather, it was time for me to rotate the piece and coat the top half with a fresh batch of resin. My working time was shorter during this second session—due to the ambient temperature being warmer later in the day—so I was even more nervous and frustrated as the resin started to set much faster than I had anticipated. One moment I was painting it on, and the next moment, it was so solid in the mixing cup that I knew—it had been determined for me and was outside of my control—that I was done applying resin. So, I propped up the sculpture, set it back under my makeshift wax-paper tent (to keep the dust off while the resin cured), and hoped and prayed. There was nothing more I could do but wait for the resin to set.

The moment of truth came when it was time to pick the seahorse up and photograph it. I carefully placed it in my curio cabinet, hoping—praying—for it to stand on its own. Due to its delicate form and top-heaviness, it stands up extremely precariously, and it’s difficult—especially with my nervous, shaking hands—to balance it at just the perfect angle. (Sometime in the future, I may attempt to brainstorm some way of shoring up its weak-spots—as its creator, I truly know this piece of art and am thus intimately familiar with its weak-spots and exactly where they are located—and/or creating some sort of removeable stand or platform for it, in an attempt to help it stand upright with more confidence. Or rather—my brilliant husband just made this ideal suggestion—I think perhaps for any future display purposes, I may set it on top of a small pile of loose sand, which would give it a natural setting as well as a little more support. That could be ideal!) Ultimately, I did get some good photos of it, which I am showing here at various angles to give you an idea of what the finished 3-dimensional piece looks like.

My materials:

The sculpture itself is made up of real seashells (including those I found on and plucked from the beaches of Sanibel Island as well as shells I purchased at the other end of the country), silicone glue, and the combined 2 parts (liquid “a” side and liquid “b” side) resin .

The tools and materials I used all along the process of creating the piece include wax paper, toothpicks, aluminum foil, wire, paper towels, plastic gloves, protective eye-glasses, plastic measuring cups, plastic mixing cups, wooden stir-sticks, tile, petroleum jelly, plastic wrap, cheap paint-brushes, two instructive You-Tube videos (one about the basics of my chosen resin product and one about proper mixing technique), a straw, a clip-on 2-armed book-light , a disposable tiny plastic communion cup, and tape. … If there were any other tools or materials I used, I cannot remember them.

My conclusion:

This is only the 2nd time in my life I’ve ever worked with anything even remotely like resin. (I’ve worked with plastic and silicone-ish molds once before, with disastrous and disheartening results.) When I was a little kid, I made a few simple sculptures out of seashells—a swan and a hippo—probably by just gluing some shells together with Elmer’s glue. But this was the first time in decades, and definitely the most detailed and the one I strove the hardest to make as beautiful as I could.

I learned that drops of resin that have fallen onto plastic wrap—once fully dried—peel off the plastic wrap clean as a whistle with no adhesion of the resin to the plastic wrap. This is an excellently useful thing to remember if I ever work with resin in the future, to know that, so long as I coat my work-surface in plastic wrap first, I could put any object that is freshly coated with wet resin directly onto the plastic wrap surface without any worries of it adhering at all to the plastic wrap, without even needing to use petroleum jelly as a non-stick coating. Yay!

I spent about 2 weeks working on this project, building it up little by little (though it felt like a lot longer—it feels like I’ve been working on it for 2 months). This is the only sculpture like it in the world, and as it used real seashells, and since no 2 seashells are ever exactly alike to my knowledge, this sculpture can never be identically recreated or copied, though similar sculptures could be made if the same types and sizes and colours of shells could be acquired and similarly assembled.

The finished sculpture stands approximately 4 & ¼ inches tall and is made from, I believe, 73 individual shells. Obviously, this piece is not meant to be a strictly accurate representation of what a seahorse looks like in reality. Due to the nature of real seashells, this seahorse—unlike the actual species on which it is based—is not symmetrical. Few seashells are symmetrical, and many have a curve or a spiral-form in them, and those that spiral tend to spiral in the same clockwise (or counter-clockwise, depending on how you want to think of it) direction. But I sincerely hope that I have, in this piece, captured the essence of a seahorse, and I hope it doesn’t require too much imagination or a cocking of the head and a squinting of the eyes and a dimming of the lights to perceive the appearance of a seahorse in this pile of chosen shells. I hope you enjoy, and I’m hoping to get it submitted to the contest before the deadline.

~~~

As always, Soli Deo Gloria!!!

Description

Click here to see an alternate view of this same piece.

My inspiration:

Every year when I was growing up, my family and I would visit my grandparents in Florida during spring break. This was, in some ways, the best week of my year, and I have ever after cherished those times with my grandparents, especially considering they both passed away during my young adulthood. Since they lived in a condo with a view of the ocean, one thing I loved doing with them was collecting seashells on the beach. So many years, I would return to my landlocked home with a new batch of shells from my favourite place. Over the years, I put these shell collections into decorative jars, and they’ve traveled with me whenever I’ve moved. These shells hold a special place in my heart because they remind me of some of the best times of my childhood with my most fondly beloved relatives.

In recent years, I have felt a particular affinity for seahorses. (They’re probably one of my top 20 favourite animals.) There’s something in me that just wants to make seahorses out of my art, and I think I need to keep making seahorses in various forms until I get all the seahorses out of my system. So, when the opportunity for this contest came up, what other subject could I choose but the one that is so filling my heart these days? Thus, I landed on my idea: a seahorse made entirely out of seashells; a creature of the sea represented by objects from the sea.

My process:

When I saw this contest, I thought of—and decided against—various other mediums before I decided to use my seashells. They were pretty and immediately accessible. I had hand-picked them from the beaches of Sanibel Island ( renowned for being the best shelling beach in the whole world), and they weren’t really doing anything in those decorative jars except looking pretty. So, I asked my husband—also an artist—what kind of glue he recommended to affix seashells to one another, and he—from his own collection of art supplies—found and lent to me a tube of silicone glue.

As I sorted through my personal shell collection, I realized that—although some of the shells I already possessed would be useful for forming the larger sections of my sculpture—I didn’t have enough tiny shells. So I had to go to my local craft store early in August to purchase a small bag of super-tiny shells, which had the perfect sizes and shapes and types for the detailed parts of my sculpture that I knew I would need.

Shells spread over my art table, sorted, and selected, I set to work gluing one to another to start forming the different parts of the seahorse’s body. I had to do this in stages, as I had to wait for the glue to fully bond 24 hours before attaching the next few seashells to the form I was creating, so it took many days of gluing and waiting before the various piles of shells started to vaguely resemble a seahorse.

Once the seahorse was all glued together, I coated it in resin. I knew long before I started this project that I would want it sealed in resin, in an effort to give it as much strength as possible. But using resin was extremely nerve-wracking, because it was the first time I’d ever worked with resin. I was terribly nervous about getting the right ratios of the two parts measured accurately and mixed thoroughly, and I knew I had a very limited working time before the liquid resin would start to set and harden. My hands were shaking as I painted the gloppy resin onto my seashell seahorse, and then hung it dangling on an apparatus I made out of wire and aluminum foil to suspend it so that the fresh resin now on the bottom half of its body would dry without adhering to whatever it would have otherwise been resting on. Five or six hours later, it was time for the 2nd coat, or rather, it was time for me to rotate the piece and coat the top half with a fresh batch of resin. My working time was shorter during this second session—due to the ambient temperature being warmer later in the day—so I was even more nervous and frustrated as the resin started to set much faster than I had anticipated. One moment I was painting it on, and the next moment, it was so solid in the mixing cup that I knew—it had been determined for me and was outside of my control—that I was done applying resin. So, I propped up the sculpture, set it back under my makeshift wax-paper tent (to keep the dust off while the resin cured), and hoped and prayed. There was nothing more I could do but wait for the resin to set.

The moment of truth came when it was time to pick the seahorse up and photograph it. I carefully placed it in my curio cabinet, hoping—praying—for it to stand on its own. Due to its delicate form and top-heaviness, it stands up extremely precariously, and it’s difficult—especially with my nervous, shaking hands—to balance it at just the perfect angle. (Sometime in the future, I may attempt to brainstorm some way of shoring up its weak-spots—as its creator, I truly know this piece of art and am thus intimately familiar with its weak-spots and exactly where they are located—and/or creating some sort of removeable stand or platform for it, in an attempt to help it stand upright with more confidence. Or rather—my brilliant husband just made this ideal suggestion—I think perhaps for any future display purposes, I may set it on top of a small pile of loose sand, which would give it a natural setting as well as a little more support. That could be ideal!) Ultimately, I did get some good photos of it, which I am showing here at various angles to give you an idea of what the finished 3-dimensional piece looks like.

My materials:

The sculpture itself is made up of real seashells (including those I found on and plucked from the beaches of Sanibel Island as well as shells I purchased at the other end of the country), silicone glue, and the combined 2 parts (liquid “a” side and liquid “b” side) resin .

The tools and materials I used all along the process of creating the piece include wax paper, toothpicks, aluminum foil, wire, paper towels, plastic gloves, protective eye-glasses, plastic measuring cups, plastic mixing cups, wooden stir-sticks, tile, petroleum jelly, plastic wrap, cheap paint-brushes, two instructive You-Tube videos (one about the basics of my chosen resin product and one about proper mixing technique), a straw, a clip-on 2-armed book-light , a disposable tiny plastic communion cup, and tape. … If there were any other tools or materials I used, I cannot remember them.

My conclusion:

This is only the 2nd time in my life I’ve ever worked with anything even remotely like resin. (I’ve worked with plastic and silicone-ish molds once before, with disastrous and disheartening results.) When I was a little kid, I made a few simple sculptures out of seashells—a swan and a hippo—probably by just gluing some shells together with Elmer’s glue. But this was the first time in decades, and definitely the most detailed and the one I strove the hardest to make as beautiful as I could.

I learned that drops of resin that have fallen onto plastic wrap—once fully dried—peel off the plastic wrap clean as a whistle with no adhesion of the resin to the plastic wrap. This is an excellently useful thing to remember if I ever work with resin in the future, to know that, so long as I coat my work-surface in plastic wrap first, I could put any object that is freshly coated with wet resin directly onto the plastic wrap surface without any worries of it adhering at all to the plastic wrap, without even needing to use petroleum jelly as a non-stick coating. Yay!

I spent about 2 weeks working on this project, building it up little by little (though it felt like a lot longer—it feels like I’ve been working on it for 2 months). This is the only sculpture like it in the world, and as it used real seashells, and since no 2 seashells are ever exactly alike to my knowledge, this sculpture can never be identically recreated or copied, though similar sculptures could be made if the same types and sizes and colours of shells could be acquired and similarly assembled.

The finished sculpture stands approximately 4 & ¼ inches tall and is made from, I believe, 73 individual shells. Obviously, this piece is not meant to be a strictly accurate representation of what a seahorse looks like in reality. Due to the nature of real seashells, this seahorse—unlike the actual species on which it is based—is not symmetrical. Few seashells are symmetrical, and many have a curve or a spiral-form in them, and those that spiral tend to spiral in the same clockwise (or counter-clockwise, depending on how you want to think of it) direction. But I sincerely hope that I have, in this piece, captured the essence of a seahorse, and I hope it doesn’t require too much imagination or a cocking of the head and a squinting of the eyes and a dimming of the lights to perceive the appearance of a seahorse in this pile of chosen shells. I hope you enjoy, and I’m hoping to get it submitted to the contest before the deadline.

~~~

As always, Soli Deo Gloria!!!