Working in three dimensions
Art & Design · GCSE · The School
Every side is the front
Put the work on a turntable, or turn it in your hands every few minutes. A form that reads from the front and collapses from the side is not finished, and you will not notice unless you look. Photograph it from four sides as you go — the photographs are also the sketchbook evidence, which a physical object cannot otherwise provide.
Adding and taking away
ADDITIVE builds up: coils, slabs, folded card, wire, plaster on a frame. You can always add more, and the joins are the weakness. SUBTRACTIVE carves down: soap, clay block, plaster block. Nothing can be put back, so it wants planning and a slower start. Most projects use both — build roughly, then cut back.
Armatures and balance
Clay and plaster limbs sag and snap under their own weight; no amount of skill prevents it, and professionals build armatures as a matter of course. Balance is the other physical fact: work out where the weight sits before it is dry. A base is not a failure of nerve, and neither is a hidden support.
A marker sees your sketchbook, and might see the object once. So the book has to carry the development. PHOTOGRAPH each stage from the SAME four angles, so the sequence reads as a change rather than as different objects. ANNOTATE what the turning revealed: "from the front the head sat right; from the left the neck was far too long, so I shortened it by a third." KEEP the maquette — the small rough version — because it shows a decision being tested cheaply before it was made expensively. INCLUDE the failure: "the first armature was too thin and the arm dropped overnight; rebuilt at 2 mm wire." Four angles, three stages, one maquette and one honest failure evidences more development than a single photograph of a finished object ever can, and the object itself has not changed.