Plaster day

Nother long day in the studio. After pulling my weight in the house before i left like a real person does. Tho sometimes i think the goalposts move when i'm not watching. Anyway today i just spent the entire day putting on sections of mother mould in plaster over the rubber mould i did yesterday. It takes so damn long, its amazing. It was well dark out by the time i left. Think there must be some advances i can make in speeding it up, like getting a bigger bucket, but u can't go all slapdash eh cos if u bugger it you've wasted a sculpture and a LOT of time.

Realised today i actually have to Write a Presentation for this proposal business. F***. How do u write a presentation? I done speeches but this is different. Speeches are about getting the hell off the stage... presentations are Selling Something. You actually care what people are left thinking afterwards. Damn. I'm really thinking i don't want this job. Its gonna be a terrible hard work, like harder than anything i ever done. But then i could do something Different to the usual lif sized bloke. I could do something pretty cool. Ah, anyway, i do my best to get it & see what happens. Won't be 100% disappointed if i don't get it though.

Today i went & bought an electronic scale so i can measure the catalyst properly for rubber moulds etc. Its a real issue if there's not enough catalyst it will never set, thus ruining your original work & wasting loads of time & mould materials. If you use too much catalyst, then u run out of catalyst before you run out of rubber, which is a PITA. Also of course you need it when you cast plastic which is pretty picky about ratios by weight.

Hmm i remember when electronic scales were a big newfangle deal & i used to see em get sold down the pawnbrokers auctions & everybody KNEW they'd been pawned by drug dealers cos who else could afford one or need the accuracy. Anyway that was then this is now & got mine for 29 bucks at Big W & the geeky side of me was weighing AA batteries & SMSing the results to people within 3 seconds of unwrapping it. How little it takes to entertain me when i'm alone in the studio huh.

Reading book about Charles Sargeant Jagger. He was a student of Lanteri who wrote my bibles of sculpture that i study all the time. That Lanteri bloke got around, he knew just about everybody who did decent sculpture round then. Anyway Jagger did a boatload of WW1 memorials & very striking they are. Sadly they all patina'd black as, so u can't see much detail in the pics. Bummer. He was pretty damn amazing modeller & he did write a book himself which is outta print. I asked the national library for a photocopy so we'll see if 1933 means its outta copyright yet. He did that pointing technique of enlarging which i'd like to try one day. Definitely an exercise to work that out. Its a bit boring & mathy apparently but having sat & mathed for hrs per large bloke i made, i suspect its actually an easier way to do it.