I've been pondering this project for a while now. Bringing questions that I get asked, here for all to see the answer. For background context for where some of these questions come from.....some of you who attend Seattle area conventions, know that I've done a couple cosplay and general costuming type panels. Sometimes, I've had some questions stick with me for a while. They're ones that I do have immediate responses for, but they're also ones I feel would help a larger audience if I posted them. I want to aim for one every fortnight, though I suppose it depends on how many more questions turn up later. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered here, by all means, message me! Here, Etsy, Facebook. Whichever is convenient for you. https://www.etsy.com/shop/arcticphoenixstudios https://www.facebook.com/ArcticPhoenixStudios So, here goes! This question came from a young lady at Emerald City Comicon this year (2014). I'd mentioned that because I work in so many different mediums, that sometimes failure is bound to happen, and sometimes they can be rather expensive failures whether monetary or time. She asked, 'how do you move on after failing on a project?' The short answer: Learn from your mistakes. The easy way out is to scream and cry about it and throw the piece away and never touch the material again, but what do you learn by doing that? The long answer: My background is in ceramics, both sculpture and pottery (yes, I cosplay a fire god, and spent a chunk of my college years playing with fire. I suppose this should surprise no one. XD). One of my instructors had this semi-mantra that he would often repeat to the beginning students, "no pot is precious." It means that no matter how much work you think you put into it, in the end, it's still clay. If it doesn't work out, smish it and start over. But it's not just about moving on. It's what you get out of the act of creating a piece of work: a lesson. So, no matter how good or bad a piece is, always evaluate it. Learn from it. Understand why something worked or didn't so you know how to, or not to replicate it (sometimes there are happy accidents!). Understanding your material(s) before starting, can help unravel some mysteries about a failed piece. Some materials are just fussy. They want conditions a particular way, and anything else will not do. Understanding this fact up front will save you some frustration and self-blame. The black clay I chose to use for the majority of my thesis exhibition sculptures, is one of those materials. Because of its density, it has a tendency to warp and explode when it's being fired, if the conditions aren't right. Three days before my thesis show, one piece did exactly that. I truly wish I had thought to take a photo of the piece in the kiln, but I think all I could do at the time was close the lid, knowing what sat inside was not a sculpture ready for its next phase, but a couple recognizable chunks and a pile of sand and tiny fragments that I had no hope of trying to reattach. And so began the process of putting it back together in three days. Not only did I have to glue the remaining pieces together, but entirely reconstruct missing pieces and then match paint to the clay and then find a gold paint that would come close to the brilliance of the fired gold luster glaze (the shiny gold decoration on fancy dishes...yeah. That stuff) that made up the line decorations on my other pieces. Click the pics for part one and part two. They'll redirect you to the detailed version of the process displayed in each composite. Part one:
What has helped me most over the years when trying to recover a failed piece, is the fact that I have taken the effort to keep challenging myself and learn new materials. It's essentially given me a vast toolbox from which I can pull solutions from to fix problems in other mediums. My art and my work, is all very interdisciplinary. Some of my recoveries though, are not always immediate. These are ones where I realize I've bitten off more than I can chew, and it's patience and practice that eventually mend and/or build these pieces. The black dragon mask that I made a couple years ago, is one such. It's the present incarnation of a failed piece I made about 10 years before, as a raven. Very similar concept with feather mane et al.
But I realized then, that I simply did not have the technical skill or knowledge to make what I imagined, and that it would need to wait, and in the interim, it evolved into the dragon. The dragon itself, is a technical challenge that is a work in progress and will be completed as I figure out how. The raven too, has been evolving and will be revisited at some point. But that's the key sometimes. Knowing when to back burner a project. Personally, I find there's no shame in doing so. In the years that the dragon/raven has been back burnered, I've grown a lot as a person, and my aesthetics have changed. So for a project as complex as these two, the fact that I made the decision to put them aside, has been for the better. I've been able to give the dragon the attention and detail that I know I wouldn't have managed when I was a teenager just for sheer lack of skill, knowledge and budget. So there's my first Q&A blog. Hope it's helped someone out there. Like I mentioned up above, if you have a question you would like answered, please message me!
