TOPIC: PrettyUgly show
Keeping it simple this year, especially since I put so much into my Homunculus Party piece. I immediately had the image of a big red bug and didn't want to fight for something deeper. I keyed out some shapes in my sketch book, formalized them digitally with some moodboards and notes. The shape I settled on is pretty directly that of a stag or rhino beetle pupa on a mossy red mars rock.
I ordered a crimson du-kit polymer clay this time, intending to paint lighter muddier orange, pink and red tones on top, leaving the clay between the shell segments a nice deep red. Normally with painting I use the usual cameo (peach) du-kit, I'll start light and darken into the crevices with paint as needed, this is a good reason to try the inverse. For the fuzzy mars rock, I'll use the same $2 car seat cover I used for my Toy Factory piece, I figured I could dye it with pen or acrylic paint (or water colour pigment knowing how I am) to be a similar bold red as the clay.
I'm very drawn to weathered, almost dirty matte textures of planet photography, and the palm tiles in my moodboard. The little bio I wrote in the moodboard is a loose way to give the piece a bit more intrigue, but also fits in with my general fixation on fat and the body. It's a thread I might take into my speculative biology setting at some point, this idea of space farers being baffled by a wholly fat creature being preserved or surviving because of their own fatphobia, extending it into a fixed scientific truth.
The process begins, wire, foil and masking tape! Later down the line I do restart the bug entirely, but I still photographed these stages so I'll give them their write up for documentations sake. Knowing I'd be attaching this to a big rock, I snapped a takeaway chopstick in half and wedged it up into its guts so I wouldn't forget to build an anchor point. (I'd forget to do this later anyway).
