With a clear idea of the sort of thing I wanted to achieve now in my mind it was time to begin the serious work of turning it into reality.
Having decided that the piece needed to celebrate the hard engineering of the car as well as capture it's movement, I opted to go for a building method that allowed me to use both modeling and carving techniques.
A favourite material of mine for this is the two part epoxy putty, Milliput. This is soft and easy to model when freshly mixed and sets extremely hard when cured .Ideal for achieving smooth surfaces and sharply defined details.
It can be seen from the photos that I approached this piece by making the various parts as separate sub assemblies.[this must be because of the engineer in me!]
One of the hardest things about working like this is a lack of being able to work on the piece as a whole to get an overview. This is less of an issue with creating scale models [kits] but for sculpture it can be tricky, as artistic interpretation means making little changes, exaggerations or emphasis of a particular feature .Traditionally a piece of sculpture is worked on as a whole for this reason.
To assist with this necessary overview, a wax sketch model was first created to help me achieve the best way to capture the energy and movement of the car and driver in motion. Often I prefer these quick sketches to the finished piece, but that's another story! . [Sadly the sketch is no longer with us, but all will become clear.]
Once happy with the look and feel of the sketch, I set about creating the hard detailed sculpture, progressing by carefully judging the balance between scale detail and artistic exaggeration.
To assist with this necessary overview I worked in combination with the original wax sketch model, substituting the wax parts with the newly created hard parts as well as remodeling and tweaking the wax sketch to balance the new parts.
It is this constant tweaking that eventually destroyed the wax model, but left a new refined Tazio born in its place!
With the benefit of hindsight I wish I had taken a lot more WIP pictures, especially some of the wax sketch stages, but constant stopping and starting to take photos always seems to break the workflow, but I hope those I do have prove interesting to those of you unfamiliar with the ‘process'.
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