SNAP! New Kickstarter (miniature snapping turtles).

Snapping turtles quibble over small change

My new year's resolution is on schedule (to launch 4 Kickstarters in 2015) with these little beasties!

They are New York's official state reptile, can live for a hundred years, and snap your fingers right off!

These are safe enough though, even in your pockets.

The project runs until Tuesday March 24, so if you like what you see, CLICK HERE to visit the project, and then snap one up!



Click these links to visit my website...SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille

New shiny patinas, and a contest update...

Tiny bronze rabbits, shiny bright patina. Steve Worthington.

Tiny Wilbur bronze rabbit, shiny bright patina. Steve Worthington.

Tiny Alfie bronze rabbit, shiny bright patina. Steve Worthington.

I've decided I love this tumbled then lacquered (or they'd quickly tarnish) finish for my tiny bunnies!
I've just put them all up on my Etsy store...

Tiny Bianca bronze rabbit, shiny bright patina. Steve Worthington.

Tiny Binky bronze rabbit, shiny bright patina. Steve Worthington.

Tiny Penelope bronze rabbit, shiny bright patina. Steve Worthington

Entries are now closed for my guess the future weight (Aug 1st 2012) of the chubby artist (me) contest.
All bets are in, now we'll just have to let time run its course.

It seems that the combination of my very own austerity fridge, and a chart for weekly visual feedback is doing the trick!
I'm going to try and slide under the bottom guess (which is 180 lbs), but we'll see, eh!
Here's my chart so far...(where it says  '3 month goals' it should be '12 week goals')

Chubby artist contest chart as of March 3, 2012

The winner of the blog portion (mention my contest in your blog to enter a draw for a winged angel mouse) has been won by Nancy Vance.
Congratulations Nancy!
I'll send you a winged angel mouse when they are back from the foundry (unless you want a non-winged mouse, in which case I can send you one now).

Click these links to visit my website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille

Contest: Guess the length of the snake and win a bronze turtle!

I said this week's post would be more fun!

I ran into Marcel, a photographer friend out running with his dogs around our local trail the other day.
Well I suppose to be more accurate he ran into me, since I was walking!
He'd recently been round our place to photograph my tree frog (the real one) to use as part of one of his always interesting compositions....

Cutle little critter, eh?

Well, after Marcel ran off in his direction and I walked off in mine, I found this rather handsome beast!
Marcel must have run right past it!

A fine looking specimen of a bull snake, I'm sure you'll agree!

And whoever can guess closest to how long the snake is will win a tiny bronze turtle.
The bigger one, since I'm all out of the smallest one right now!

Not a very spectacular prize, but then again, not a very involved contest! Just take a wild guess and either leave it as a comment on this post or email it to me.

Closing date is my next blog post when I'll announce the winner, whenever that is (most likely the weekend of May 15/16), so if this is still the most recent post, have a go!

I'm adding this after only a day since I've had such a great response already: at this rate it's entirely possible by the close of this contest multiple people could guess it right, in which case I'll assign them numbers and roll a dice to determine the winner.

Only one guess per person though, so don't email every size by the inch between 1 and 100 feet!

I'll take these snake pics with me back to the spot and lay out a string to match its position, then measure it.

Good luck!


Click these links to visit my website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille

Update on ....of...... Galleries, last I heard is that he's not responding to phone calls and emails from the collection folks who are trying to recover my share of his selling some bronzes of mine. (Edit-issue resolved after 1 yr thanks to Goldman, Evans and Trammell)

A night at the museum, and my Nov 6 show progress...

Last night Meridee and I went to the Albuquerque Museum's miniatures and more show grand opening.
I'm lucky enough to have had three of my mice and tiny bunnies picked as two small sets of sculpture. I'd never been there before, but I was surprised by how grand it really was.
I've never seen so many people all dressed up to the nines around these parts before.
Maybe I've been hanging out in all the wrong places, but I felt strangely transported to New York City or something.

Anyhow, the way they sell stuff is quite interesting.
Every painting and sculpture has a price on it, and also has a number next to it, and a correspondingly numbered ballot box type thing mounted somewhere nearby.
You get a bunch of green paper slips when you go in, so you can fill out your info if you want to buy something, and drop it in the right box.

At the end of the evening the boxes are opened, and a name is drawn from each box, so that person gets to buy that piece.
Since paintings are one of a kind, most boxes will only have one winner.
But bronzes are different.
I had 5 available listed, so if there were more than five names in the box, the first five pulled would be winners.

Of course they don't actually win anything. Except the chance to buy their prize.

Since I'm one of those self obsessed artist types I contorted myself about so I could see down into my boxes (a bit tricky without blocking the light from getting in through the tiny slit in the top).

Of course I cunningly disguised my actions to resemble someone with some very serious muscle imbalances, thoughtfully peering closer at someone else's work.

It's what us artists do you know.
Is it the money, or the tickle to the ego that makes us do it?
It's either a bit of both, or a lot of both. Probably a lot.

The place was jammed with the elegantly dressed. But every once in a while I would glance around and see another strangely twisted person appearing to scrutinize some art, while hovering directly over a ballot box.

Well I was very happy to see more than one green slip in both my boxes.
So I felt rather pleased with myself when we left.
Which was a bit before the end, so I'll have to find out later how it all went.

Well, thanks to Lee Wilson, Mike Masse and Madd Castings I've got everything I need for my show.

Strangely I already sold all but one of my new small-ish turtles, so the one at Manitou will have to be for order taking only until I get more done.
So besides all the stuff already over there, there'll be tree frogs on balls, a mid size bumper to bumper, some wine bottle stoppers (turtle and rabbit), a toad on a leaf, and the small-ish turtle.

I should insist on putting it all in a sealed glass display case with a load of live crickets wandering about among them.

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

Tiny turtle dilemma – the problems involved when producing miniature bronze turtle sculptures

There’s a great Seinfeld 2 part story called ‘the bottle deposit’ where Kramer and Newman are racking their brains to figure something out: Newman wants to take empty beer bottles to Michigan and deposit them for the extra five cents you get in that state.

Kramer tells him it’s impossible.
If they drive them there, the gas, toll booth and truck rental prices will kill them.
Newman’s determined to crunch the numbers every possible way to make it add up.

I have a similar dilemma with my tiny turtles.
Plenty of people have told me it’s not worth the hassle making tiny pieces. The work involved means you have to charge a lot, or you just don’t make any money on them.
Things with my tiny turtles seemed to be going well. But my supplier got fed up fiddling with them since his casting results were inconsistent. Sometimes they’d come out just fine, so he could give them to me after minimal metal finishing. If that happened every time things would still be great.

But the metal finishing is where he loses money since he gave me a per piece fixed price based on the assumption of consistently good casting results. But sometimes there’d be problems that would need extra time to fix (time is money), or he’d just ditch the problem ones and cast more. Again, wasted time and effort on his part. His prices were great for me, which is what I based my retail price on. But he’s had enough of making them.

So now I’m getting them made somewhere else, but it’s costing me more. They’re casting great, but the sprues the foundry puts on the bottom are bigger than my previous supplier’s, and they obliterate more of the under surface, including my initials.
So they need more work done after casting (after cutting off the bigger sprue, the bottom of the turtle needs to be metal worked, essentially re-sculpting that portion where the sprue was attached on each one), and that extra time adds to the bill.
I don’t want to raise the price on them, they’re 2 of my most affordable pieces.
I like that just about anyone who wants one can get one.



Here’s my options. Do I :-

Stop making them, it’s just too much trouble.
Drop the quality (just flatten off the bottom rather than have metal workers re-sculpt it) so I can still make a bit of money on them (they’d look fine except from underneath)?
Maintain the original quality but raise the price so I can still make a bit of money on them?
Maintain quality but keep the original price so I make next to nothing but you can still have one to enjoy at the same price as before, while I continue to explore other options?

I have decided to go with the last option:
Keep the same price, while trying to figure out a way to make it work.
At least for now.

Like Newman I’m hoping to find a successful ‘other option’ before too long and prove the nay sayers wrong!

They are available from me directly, from my Etsy store, and from some of the galleries I show in.

Final bronze elephant and more garden snake action!

Well I've been tooling around town in the hoodrat mobile lately to some satisfyingly bemused expressions.
And I've got the teeny tiny version of 'Senior moment' all finished up.
I posted a previous blog on making the original clay HERE, followed that up with mold making and shooting waxes HERE, and here's the finished piece (which you can see more views of on my Etsy store and website).

But the really exciting news is another snake sighting in the back yard!
This time it wasn't the usual bull snake, it was a COACHWHIP snake.

Meridee called me outside saying my snake was hanging out in some old budlia branches, but when I saw him I recognized he wasn't old faithful.
I've bumped into a few of these before. They often look quite pink. They like to lunch on lizards.

And the one's I've seen can shift like nothing else. One time I was sure I must have run one over that decided to make a mad dash across the road.
It was moving like someone had it on a long string tied to a sprinting greyhound, but a peek in the rear view mirror showed no road kill I'm glad to say.

So I was pretty careful not to get too close at first or else I would have spooked it into speeding off and missed my photo op. I edged closer very slowly...
Look at those beady eyes!
Curiously, a neighbor gravely told me, shortly after we moved in, that coachwhip snakes gang together in long grass and stand on their heads and will whip at your legs with their tails leaving quite serious wounds.

Fortunately I managed to express surprise without delivering any serious wounds to myself through suppressed laughter. I reckon that little gem got into circulation around the era of the 'Little house on the prairie' when some big scaredy cat maybe ran away from a garter snake or something, through some bushes and had to explain his scratches and actions to an inquisitive audience of his peers.

Or if not his peers, perhaps some very young children, who are prone to believe whatever a grown up tells them. I imagine he stumbled scratched, panting and bleeding out into a clearing of tiny yet studiously attentive Sunday school students.

But I digress. My photo op finally made a break for it, and covered a couple of dozen feet in what seemed like less than a second to hide behind a bush.I checked it out from one side of the bush, then the other side, then back again and it wasn't there!
I hunted around, but I couldn't find it anywhere.
Take your eyes off for a second and whoosh.
Gone.
Oh well.
I wonder what will show up next.

Putting it all together (making micro size bumper to bumper turtle sculpture)

In our last exciting episode we watched from the edge of our seats while our intrepid hero risked life and limb to fearlessly cut up pieces of granite tile and polish the edges.
All without the use of a safety net.
This time those tiles get pressed into service as small sculpture bases.
I used a DREMEL engraver (it vibrates a pointy end to break up surfaces and engrave things).
Some JB Weld, which is a top notch epoxy resin recommended by my main man at Advanced Casting, Frank. He casts my tiny turtle parts. A white chinagraph pencil, and some paperclips and other stuff to mix up the epoxy round out the list of stuff I'll need.
I mark the turtle positions (inside the boundary of each piece) with the chinagraph pencil onto the granite surface.
I use the extremely ominous looking DREMEL engraver to hammer on the granite to roughen it up. This provides a 'tooth' for the epoxy to adhere to. Of course I use all the relevant safety gear (see DREMEL instructions for more info). You don't want granite dust so fine it looks like smoke drifting into places on your (or anyone else's) person it doesn't belong.
That is one noisy tool for something so small! It sounds like a road crew with pneumatic drills has broken in and is trying to smash up your kitchen sink.
I rough up the bottoms of the turtle parts then mix up the epoxy and stick 'em on the granite.
I like to wait overnight for the epoxy to fully cure. Of course I allow my attention to wander a bit during this phase: perhaps towards the tv for instance.

The next day, self adhesive felt dots and a signature are added...
Viola! A micro sized version of 'bumper to bumper'.
Ready for its close up.


Here's my elaborate photographic set up. A bit of blue gray paper propped up, some Lowel Ego lights, a reflector, and a bean bag for the camera to rest on. I learned a lot from Gary Regester's site on lighting with Lowel Ego's. You'll get better photo tips from him than me!

I tweeked the contrast a bit in photoshop to blow out the background more towards white, and I also set the camera to over expose one stop when I took the pics.

The rest of my bronzes are all here on my website.

Tiny Binky wins a prize!

I just got back from opening the mail. I'm delighted to learn of an award for tiny Binky, one of my very small bronze rabbits in an upcoming exhibition.
Apparently the other sculpture of mine in the show, an extremely tiny turtle, sold during the jurying-in process!

The Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers Society of Washington, D.C. awarded Tiny Binky the Second place winner for sculpture in the 75th Annual International Exhibition of Fine Arts Miniatures.
At the Strathmore Mansion, North Bethesda, Maryland.
Find out about the show here, and see more tiny bunnies on the rabbits page of SteveWorthingtonArt.com here.

Miniature bronze turtles

Chasing tails around a penny.
I can't help myself when it comes to miniatures. I love to make things big and small.
More pics on my website's turtle page.