Newsboy-Huge Strides In The Life-Size Sculpture

December 28, 2004- January 3, 2005
Sculptor Bridgette Mongeon has documented the entire process of creating a figurine of a newsboy and a life-size bronze sculpture. Watch the artist work through these posts. In this blog, she has also included information for students and teachers. In the previous post, there was a lot of working through the holidays.

If you are lost and want to go back to the chronological running list of posts, follow this link.

What an exciting week it has been. We have made tremendous progress on the sculpture this week. It started with the shoes. They are defined, and now we are just getting to the fine detail. We are moving up the leg to the socks and pants.

Throughout the week, Christina and I have taken turns working on the head, adding clay, taking away, smoothing and then adding clay, taking away, smoothing. The last day of the week I asked Christina to finalize her work on the face and then hand it over to me. I just wanted to spend an hour or so with it before securing it to the body. Doing any of the detail work on Dusty’s face after it is on the body is a job for an acrobat. It is much easier to work on his face when I can hold it in my own hands.

When we are not working on the head, we spend a lot of time working on the floor, lying on pillows and blankets, making ourselves as comfortable as possible as we refined and defined the shoes, the socks, and under the knickers. There is still much to do in that area. The last day of the week, Chris was beginning the long process of cutting shoelaces and threading them into the clay, like we did with the small sculpture. We also must spend a great deal of time closing up any undercuts in this area. An undercut is an area that you can pass something through or a deep grove. So we fill the little areas under each shoelace with clay. If we did not do this, the rubber would get stuck around the shoelace when we start making the mold and would tear the rubber.

Before we entered the New Year I wanted to attach the head, a milestone of the process. I had to hold off with defining the upper torso until the head was attached. Though I did surprise myself. I “eyed” the space between the buttons on his shirt by using the photos. Then I remembered I had the shirt to look at, and don’t you know I was right on with my measurements! The head was added on the last day of the year.

To attach the head we had to be very careful of placement, a very tricky thing. You don’t want too much neck or too little, and then we had to make sure it was secure to the torso. We did so by hammering a threaded rod through the head, neck and deep into the torso. It was such a great satisfaction to see him put together. It is also exciting to know I am getting to a new stage in the process. It renews the creative energy inside. I am hoping to have the sculpture finished within the next three weeks and ready for approval by the client.

Monday, January 3rd, I am picking up the first small bronze sculptures from the foundry. I can hardly wait to see them.

Stay tuned next week to see the sculpture complete with head and torso and photos of the small bronze in the blog post, Now We Are Getting There.