Cat Elementals - Works in Progress Step 2

Here is the first Elemental cat Earth pulled from her mold. She needs a little finishing before I paint her. You can see she's quite a bit more finished than the first pictures you saw of her.

You can see the biggest difference in the Water Elemental. She's much more finished.

I'm finishing off the Air and Fire Elementals now.



I'm thinking of using a color scheme like the one in this one below for the series.
I'll show you what I've come up with for the new Elementals and how the color scheme is working in the next few days.

And-Now For Something Completely Different- Works in Progress

I've been sculpting with fabric for yrs now, but my initial training was sculpting with traditional materials like clay and wax.

I had an odd dream the other night about these elemental cat women. You know Earth, Air, Water and Fire....I got up and did some sketches.

I had been reading this fabu book on the sculptures of women during the time of Akhenaten and decided sculpting them as tiny bas-relief sculptures. The pieces are around 2 inches in diameter.

I'm going to make molds on the sculptures and produce them in limited editions. They should make nice pendants.

I was thinking of faux finishing them so they look like things like yellow jasper or faince (turquoise colored) beads.

I need to smooth the surface of earth cat a bit more before I have a mold put on it and the water cat is still rough, but I think they're going to be quite nice when they're finished.

Sewing Free Form Figures CAPTURED

The way I work can seem very involved. In this tutorial, I wanted

to share how I
made one of my favorite pieces, CAPTURED .

I've always loved the colors of the Egyptian Funerary Art and the textures and spiraling shapes in Gustave Klimt's work.

I've always done
sketches to
help me
plan my
sculptures,
but I have never let the drawings get too involved though. The fabrics and the sewing itself often dictated changes in the finished piece.

After I collected up different shades and textures of fabrics in the the Egyptian inspired colors , I chose the wires I wanted to use for the armatures.

I wanted the starfish to act as a base and it needed to hold the mermaid securely. Even though it was only 8 inches in diameter, I chose 14g galvanized steel wire for the basic framework because it was stiff enough to hold the shape I wanted. After making the basic shape, I wrapped the 14g with 22g wire.

This texturing of the armature made it easier to cover the wires with acrylic yarn. I used a buttonhole stitch for this step. The yarn covering made it easier to attach the strips of batting used to plump up the starfish's shape.

The mermaid may have been a smaller piece, but her construction was much more involved. The process was basically the same as the starfish, but I worked in layers on this figure. After setting up the armature, I covered her with batting and started sewing fabric on the tail.

Once I had a stable fabric base I used more pieces of batting to create breasts and the facial structure . More fabric was then whip stitched over top. On the head, the eyes were sewn on and the forehead, nose and chin were then shaped and sewn down.

On the torso, the breasts were formed by sewing batting around a marble and sewing it in place. Once they were covered with fabric, I continued the spiraling fabric shapes I started on the tail up the torso and over the breasts.

The final steps on the starfish were to secure the resin eye in
place, sew on an eyelid and embellish the entire surface with beads.

The mermaid's finishing touches were beading the hair and embellishing the torso with seed beads. Elastic trim was used to bind the mermaid in place.


This has always been one of my favorite pieces.