{"id":162,"date":"2020-12-27T23:27:28","date_gmt":"2020-12-27T23:27:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sculptorstouch.com\/?page_id=162"},"modified":"2020-12-27T23:27:28","modified_gmt":"2020-12-27T23:27:28","slug":"learning-patience-from-sculpting","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sculptorstouch.com\/?page_id=162","title":{"rendered":"Learning Patience from Sculpting"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by DLSproule<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

I guess you\u2019d have to say I have a squirrel mind. It jumps around a lot, first this direction and then the other. It doesn\u2019t focus particularly well. In my lifetime, I have undertaken many big projects and have finished very few of them. I used to have a terrible habit at one of my old jobs of doing 95% of a task and then not doing the final 5%, because I was I such a hurry to get onto the next task. Sculpting has helped me beat those inner demons. It has taught me to come to terms with the fact that not everything can be done instantaneously \u2013 or even quickly. It has taught me to take my time and enjoy the process. Since I started sculpting, I have gone from finishing about 20% of projects I undertake, to finishing all of them. And the end product is much nicer than it would have been when I was young and impatient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lesson 1 \u2013 too much too fast<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The extreme caution I had demonstrated on my first few sculptures was wearing off. I was no longer afraid to swing the hammer. In fact, I was getting downright hammer happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first two sculptures were carved out of soapstone and the third was wonderstone. One out of the three was soft, the other two quite hard, but all of them chipped in mostly predictable ways. The third sculpture (the soft one) I had finished in a weekend. I was starting to feel like an expert. But with sculpting, it usually doesn\u2019t pay to get cocky, to look for shortcuts or to assume that the stone is going to behave the way you want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On my fourth sculpture, I was revisiting the theme\/motif I had established with an earlier piece. It was the second of the half dozen \u201chooded figures\u201d I have carved \u2013 this one was sitting down with his fist under his chin \u2013 or at least it would have been under his chin, if he\u2019d had a chin rather than just an empty hood. I was working on the hood, thinking that with just the right stroke and the right positioning of the chisel, I could take off the little square of stone I needed to remove to create the impression of shoulders. Tap, tap\u2026oh damn. The piece of stone that sheered off was at least three times what I had intended. There went the entire shoulder! Oh well. I just had to make my figure a little skinnier. And since the whole sculpture was smaller, I could go even faster. Tap, tap, tap, tap\u2026you can probably guess what happened next. Half the sculpture came off and landed inches from my toes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somehow I managed to salvage what was left, creating a very skinny hooded figure. The effect was quite surreal and suitable for the subject matter. I was lucky that time. The most recent occasion when I was trying to carve too quickly, the beautiful stone I was working on split right in half, slicing the female figure I was carving in half at the waist. Another promising sculpture reduced to rubble by trying to go too fast. Three days of work and an expensive stone gone to waste!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lesson 2 – too little too fast<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most common error caused by impatience while sculpting \u2013 is removing too little stone rather than too much. Nothing is more beautiful than a well-thought-out, skillfully executed stone sculpture. But when the sculptor is in too much of a hurry, they tend to skip steps:<\/p>\n\n\n\n