WhirledofNature2-1-23

The base is looking good - surface refinement and finishing will await a future date

with the grinders.

Meanwhile, a new piece of equipment arrives to help with the fabrication as Whirled of Nature

grows in stature.

And with that in mind, it is time to clear the decks in front of the studio. Breathe

gets rigged for moving to the front yard, and while I'm at it I decide to get a weight for it.

Five hundred pounds - and here's a fun fact, that's what the base alone for Whirled of Nature

weighs.

I feel like now some of the real visual drama can begin. The base is the platform from which

will spring the action for this sculpture, and there is certainly a lot of thought and work that

goes into it, but it's not the part of the sculpture that will pack visual punch.

As with the base, it begins with pattern making. For me it is an old fashioned process of enlarging the

patterns I saved from the model by gridding the smaller pattern and then scaling up the grid to the

4' x 8' sheets of cardboard that I cut the patterns from. The sheet steel comes on pallets cushioned

by these sheets of cardboard, and I save them for many uses - but this is a perfect application. It

not only allows me a nice substrate for the patterns, but also allows me to map out an efficient

use of the sheet steel I'll be cutting up.

Here is where the overhead hoist earns its place in the studio. The sheet steel has little

structural integrity until it gets tacked together, and that hoist is my indispensible assistant.

Here the two-dimensional shapes transform from separate, flimsy entities

into an increasingly rigid three-dimensional whole.

There are three of these "birds" to make, and one after the other their "legs" take shape.

Now things are looking nicely dramatic. In the center form you can see the piece of wood leaning

which is another pattern, in this case for the interior bracing I will be creating and adding in before

closing up the back of these forms. And before I do that I need to understand just how the

"body" of these birds will fit these "legs."

Okay, onward!