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Posted on: Thursday 20 November 2014

Painting My Mannequin


Hello! 

At my desk in the studio
 Update! which will be mainly shown through photos as I think they are reasonably self explanatory. After priming my mannequin I then began to paint it, which is a very long process as I use a small fine paint brush in order to achieve the amount of intricacy I wish for. 


Arm





I finished painting both arms and then moved onto painting the torso of the mannequin 

Finished arm

I started to paint the torso


I took a few photos of the mannequin in front of a wall I had painted to see what effect I would get with the pattern on pattern. 









Front of the torso

Back of the torso
This is the arms and torso assembled and almost finished in my studio space. 

mannequin plus my sketchbook





The back of the torso

The front of the torso

My aim is to use the mannequins as part of a sculpture. I plan on distorting the figures and began doing a series of quick sketches to work out different ideas for the forms to take. I want to deform the shape of the body somehow. 

Here are a couple of the quick sketches. 












A few more images of the mannequin. 










My next step is to finish painting the full mannequin, and then begin experimenting with distorting the figure.


If you would like to see more of my work, don't forget to like my Facebook page, and follow me on my other social medias - find all links at the top.

Alexzandria 

Posted on: Thursday 13 November 2014

Priming My First Mannequin

Hello! 

It's been a very busy time for me so I am going to try to back date what I have been doing over the past while with a few blog posts this week. I am three weeks off having to do my presentation before Christmas, also my dissertation is due soon! So I am juggling a lot of things right now, it's all happening! 

 I got my first mannequin at the start of October, I quickly began experimenting with how I would go about priming it! 

Mannequin head with blob

Fully assembled the mannequin appears to be floating 



One thing about the mannequin that at first made priming it quite an obstacle was the many different textures and types of plastic it was made up of.




my first attempt at priming the hand



I didn't do any research into how to go about priming plastic but I already had white acrylic paint, which in the past I've used as a primer on numerous occasions. So I gave that a bash but I was not surprised that it didn't take to the plastic and it pealed right off as soon as it was dry, as you can see bellow. 






The paint pealing off the plastic arm

I then started researching how to properly prime and turn a shiny plastic surface into a matte paintable one. It turns out you can buy spray on plastic primer, that kind of works like a spray paint however it adheres to what are usually very difficult to paint surfaces, such as shiny plastics and metals

With one coat of primer

This worked perfectly, So I sprayed the entire mannequin with it , at first with just one coat and left that to dry


With one coat of primer



The mannequin has glass eyes I did not want to ruin, so I covered them with tissue and primed the head 




I also primed the metal stand.
Then I sprayed the mannequin with a second coat.


With two coats

With two coats of plastic primer

I then decided in order to get the best results and vibrancy in colour, when I start to paint the mannequin, I needed to add a third coat. The third coat I used was a canvas primer, which I painted the entire mannequin with. 


This shows the difference the canvas primer made
I was very happy with the opaque white I was left with after taking all these steps. 


Ready to paint now! 

I will be posting again soon to show my next steps, so keep an eye out! 



If you would like to see more of my work, don't forget to like my Facebook page, and follow me on my other social medias - find all links at the top. 

Alexzandria

Posted on: Monday 13 October 2014

Degree show material experiments

Hello!!

The time has come! Fourth year has commenced and I have ALREADY just finished my fourth  week ! I spent the entire summer trying to develop my ideas and decide upon what it was I wanted to create for my degree show. Once my final year began, safe to say I felt overwhelmed and not ready! The first and second weeks I felt rather lost and found it really very difficult to commit to an idea. I knew I wanted to create a room installation but the fact I do not have the space I would be working in yet was really holding me back. 

Week three hit and I had a very positive meeting with my tutor, in which she encourage me to go down to the sculpture studios and just start experimenting. After doing this, I feel like my ideas and inspirations all just fell into place. The process of actually creating something helped me relax and settle upon an idea. Being able to physically build with the materials helped me envisage what my installation would look like. So now I have a vision... and it's time to start work making it a reality.  

I used chicken wire and molded it into 'blobular' like shapes, I then filled the shapes I had made with expanding foam to achieve this very organic shape you see below 


The expanding foam dried and kept the shape really very well, however it's colour was left with a slight green tint. As I would be looking to achieve a very vibrant colour when painting it, I needed to experiment with priming to give me a white base. 



With mod roc
Here you see (above) I tried covering the expanding foam in mod roc, This however left me with to much of a texture, I then tried sanding that down but I didn't like the results that it gave me. 
I ended up priming the sculpture with white acrylic paint (see below)

With mod roc and white acrylic primers 




I then tested out how vibrant a colour pay off I would get with a singular coat of white paint to prime. 
I done this by testing orange and purple, this was very successful and I was happy to see the colours dried opaque and bright. 

colour test



I also experimented with using the mod roc straight onto the shape I'd molded from the wire, however although this gave a very opaque white colour and a strong base to paint upon, I again did not like the texture. 


Here you see a more detailed study of the colour vibrancy. I am very happy with how bright they are showing up. 



Half painted on acrylic half mod roc 



 I am going to be using mannequins throughout my installation, so I needed to also experiment with how paint would take to the form. I went down to my sculpture studios and asked around however there seemed to be a bit of a shortage in the uni. I was given this, but I was told I will need to return the mannequin at the end of the year. So I am going to use it as a tester piece but source my own mannequins, and solely use my own to paint and have in my degree show. 


I am feeling really very excited I can't wait to now get my own mannequin and start to transform her, I also plan on incorporating other found objects too. 

As always keep an eye out for more blog posts! 

If you would like to see more of my work, don't forget to like my Facebook page, and follow me on my other social medias - find all links at the top.

Alexzandria