Soap Carvings and Then Some

Soap Carving

Assignment:
Carve two forms from life (a small, plastic animal) using soap as your medium. Observe and depict proportions.  Apply concepts of time to one of your carvings so that the form no longer represents your chosen animal.  Use the same animal for both forms.

Materials:
-One good quality bar of soap - two bars are best.
-Carving Tools
-One plastic animal figurine

The carving of these ducks out of soap was definitely a process. It was different for me because I'm used to creating from building my way up. In this case, I had to carve out the negative space around the duck in the soap. I had to force myself to look at it all backwards. In the end, I was pleased with the work I had done to get to that point; however, there was another section to this project that I still had to embark on. It was the part where we took the least proportionate carving and made it into something completely different.

For this part of the project, we had to make 4 subtractive and 4 additive changes to our soap. The List below will describe each step I made while showing images for each step as well.

Step 1: Subtractive

To begin, I cut off the base of my poor little duck. This was subtractive because I took away a large chunk of my soap.

Step 2: Subtractive

The next step I took was beheading the duckling, subtracting its head from its now poor lifeless body.

Step 3: Additive

In this step, I melted down oil pastels and covered the head and the body with them by rolling the 2 in it.

 Step 4: Subtractive

Here I cut off the duck's tail. The "detailing" is subtractive because I took away a piece of the duck that was attached before

 Step 5: Subtractive

In step 5, I cut up pieces of wood and burned the edges of them. This is subtractive because when wood burns, it goes through a chemical change. This change causes the wood to lose some of its mass.

 Step 6: Additive

In this step I glued the burnt wood pieces to my body and decapitated head and tail. It's additive because I put something else on my piece.

 

Step 7: Additive

In step 7, I added a cut up metal chain to the mix.

 Step 8: Additive

Lastly, I reattached the head and the tail in a new way, making it an additive change.

 The last part of this assignment was to add some sort of a base to our recycled soap creation. We were allowed to choose any type of base that would properly add the finishing touch for presentation of the piece. I chose to stack up silver coins and set my sculpture on top of the stack. 

Since my end solution in a way characterized a deserted pirate ship, my class thought it would be nice to convey my final piece on top of coins like a pirate's treasure.