great moments in sculpture #1009



This week's extracurricular projects centered around the new Lander University sculpture logo.  In between the week's worth of critiques and last minute fixes to projects before deadlines my trusted sculpture worker Ali and I planned to draw and paint a 10' wide version of the sculpture logo on the floor of our outdoor work space.

 



The patio floor suffered from years of over spray, scrapes and mystery stains.  The giant logo could only help.

Drawing the logo on the computer was easy, even with my primitive software.  Drawing it on concrete was a challenge.  After thoroughly cleaning the floor, I began drawing the logo using Sharpie markers.  The concrete was tough on the marker tips and my improvised compass scraped the tips off of 2 markers just to draw 2 circles.  Outlining the "Mighty S" was more of a challenge to my brain but less of a challenge to the Sharpies. 

Once the contours were in place we crawled around on the floor with a gallon of paint and two cheap brushes trying to color inside the lines.  One of us had a bit of a problem staying inside the lines......I'm not going to mention any names, but it wasn't me.

While we painted, the wind blew sawdust all over the wet paint, leaves fell off the oak trees into the wet paint and a sculpture student somehow managed to walk right in the wet paint leaving fading black footprints from his soccer shoes.

Graphic Design Guru, Professor Slagle stepped in to save me a few days work on the text.  He cut me a large vinyl stencil and after placing it carefully...

We painted it black...

And removed the vinyl to reveal the letters.  Much easier than using brushes.

That's what it looks like now from the next floor up.  A major improvement in the view.

While we worked on the floor, Professor Slagle worked on the glass doors leading out to the patio.  He had an idea to merge graphic design and sculpture by generating a 3D vinyl logo.  It's not easy to see in the image, but the logo above consists of about 17 layers of vinyl rising up off the surface of the glass.  It's tactile and awesome.  Slagle is great.

Oh and my students did some great things this week too.  More on that later.