Animal sketches made for sculptures

Bit of a quick post this week.
Just a handful of animal scribbles I've made at various times for working from:
mainly bits and pieces that caught my attention I didn't want to forget.

I got a bunch of spectacular pics of Sprightly in Antarctica this last week, so I'll be posting them soon.
I don't think the mice need any introduction.
This was my old room-mate's puppy, Kahlua the chocolate lab. I almost became a sculptor when I got stuck into making a model of him out of Sculpey probably back in 1998, but it got broken and I never finished it.
It would be several years later before I got my hands on some clay and the sculpting bug finally got a hold of me!
This is my tree frog. I've got a few more ideas to do with tree frogs right now.
These are some macaque expressions and hairstyle studies I made for my monkey/turtle discus thrower.
Grumpy old toads.

My website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
My Etsy store, CritterVille

My favorite art criticism is simply 'wow'.

Any art with a great sense of style, character and accuracy gets my vote every time.

Drape that over a compelling idea and you’ve really got a winner.

I prefer naturalism, but not for its own sake. For me it has to be done well.

The good stuff in any genre is always harder to find (but easy to spot when you find it).

Since I have a great respect for craftsmanship in the arts I am more drawn to work that is stylishly and expertly executed, with great character and flair, and with naturalism as its starting point.

The work can have departed quite wildly in the final incarnation, but I like it better when the initial impulse to create it was inspired by a natural emotion or something else in nature I can relate to.

I usually prefer that to visual work which is attempting to communicate some intellectual notion or mental concept.

For the most part I think words are better at doing that.

Like philosophy for instance.

Which might explain why a critic’s interpretation of some art seems more important than the art itself. When the words speak, but the art doesn’t. And art that says nothing gives the critic more freedom to say what’s on his mind.

A worthy idea for a piece of art could be as simple as communicating an animal or person's character or personality. Of course it could be a good deal more complicated too.

I love it when a piece of art stops me in my tracks with a sense of awe and wonder.

When it seems obvious the artist was inspired, but also skillful enough to pull it off.

That's why my favorite art criticism is simply ‘wow’.

The day Nosey mouse was born, and his current work for charity...

These pics were taken the day Nosey was born...


It was Dec 29, 2006 in Santa Fe.
This was taken in town the day after...
I suppose Nosey should have two birthdays, like the Queen.

One for the day he was born in clay, and one for first day he emerged from his cocoon of investment material as a fully fledged bronze.

I decided, starting June 1st to donate one mouse to auctions benefitting animal shelters for every five mice sold. No matter who sold them (me, my Etsy store or galleries), and of course if each person buying only buys one, no matter, each gets added to the tally and every time I pass another 5, one goes to a charity auction to benefit animal shelters.

And of course it's not just Nosey mouse, it's any of my family of six mice.

I started by donating 2 mice to cover my first 10 sales from my starting date. They were auctioned at a cocktail party in a very fancy home and the proceeds are now benefitting cats and dogs at Felines and Friends in Santa Fe.
They assist other shelters in finding homes for unwanted pets and strays. They also take in some that need veterinary help.

I'm always a bit leery of websites that proclaim 'a portion of sales are donated to...' or 'a percentage of sales are donated to...'
Always seems a bit vague to me. I always want to know 'what portion?' or 'what percentage?'.
After all, you could drop a dollar in a charity bucket once in your life, rationalize it came from your sales, and therefore counts as a portion or percentage.

0.00000001% can be called a percentage of sales, as much as 50% can be called a percentage of sales.
If you stop donating after a dollar, but keep selling forever, the percentage or portion you gave just keeps getting smaller, that's all.
So to all those out there who want to know how my mice are helping homeless cats and dogs, I went with one mouse donated for every five mice sold.

So if donated mice sell at auction for their retail value, each mouse you buy from me, my Etsy store or a gallery amounts to about $50 of help for an animal shelter.

When we lived in Venice, California there was a female cat in the neighborhood who was bent on populating the whole area with her kittens.
We managed to catch one and adopted her as our pet. She had 2 kittens before we got her spayed (one of which we found a home for, the other we kept).
Later Meridee's doctor told us keeping them would kill her (Meridee's allergies were getting severely worse).
Luckily we found a great home for them both before moving to Santa Fe.
Here they all are in a pretend Friskies commercial I made for fun...

Other than that, I just got a tree frog (so I'll be making tree frogs - stay tuned for that!)
My website.

What's fine about fine art?

There's a gallery in town with bronze dogs by two different artists.
The gallery director (not the owner) told me one wouldn't rate as 'fine art' with her since they're just dogs being dogs, whereas the other she would describe as 'fine art' because it's not just being a dog, it's more arty and it has an idea.
I said for my money the dogs being dogs had character, personality and were more finely sculpted with a great deal of style. While the arty one seemed quirky more than fine. Maybe the fineness of the idea eluded me.I said, since I thought they were very finely made, I'd call the regular dogs 'fine art', and the other one 'quirky art'.She mentioned that the quirky/arty one she had been championing had been her choice to bring in to the gallery, so that may have explained her harder sell!

On a different note, my hoodrat is now finished and installed, and as soon as I get a nice sunny day to get some pics of him showing off around town I'll post a few!

The birth of Nosey mouse

It was in the last couple of days of 2006 that Nosey was born.
At least in clay. There was still the trial by fire that had to come before bronzes would emerge.
First I took lots of pictures of the real Nosey, nosing around.

Then I poked and prodded and added to my blob of wax based clay.

I kept poking and prodding and adding until finished.

A fairly lengthy process followed whereby a mold was made (bad news for the clay version, it gets a bit trashed in the process).

Then wax duplicates come from the mold (good news for the immortality of Nosey).

The fine folks at Anderson Enterprise are responsible for casting my mice.

After they've each been invested in their own one time breakable molds, the wax is melted out, and bronze poured in its place. Then they are broken out (sounds very wild west), cleaned up (a bit like me after an exciting feed), patinated and...
...Voila, Nosey mouse is immortal (unless there's ever a countrywide sweep for bronze mice to melt down and use for tiny cannons).Click here to see lots more of my sculptures on my website.