City Block

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This is a small one I did half as a test and half as a gift for my sister for Christmas. I was thinking of switching away from all the trees and trying a city scene. I was envisioning multiple pieces that when hung next to each other would form the city. I’m not sure if that’s going to happen or not, but it was fun to experiment.

Again I used the air-dry clay, and the buildings are grouped on layers. The first layer is the three buildings in the background, and it builds up until the wall, which is the fifth layer.

This was a fun one, although a little frustrating. I finally ended up gluing the layers to each other before they were even dry, just to keep them from sliding around and pulling out of shape. Then once they were dry, I sanded the crap out of them just to make them more integrated.

The challenge in this one was the color. In the end I am happy with the way they came out - it was tough coming up with different color grays that didn’t clash with each other. There are A LOT of layers of paint and glazes on there. Also, it took me a while to realize that there had to be deep shadows between the buiding, because I couldn’t figure out why it looked so flat and dead until I went almost all the way to black in the shadows. The layers are not that thick, so I couldn’t rely on them to create the shadows on their own.

This piece is about 3.5“ wide by 5.5” tall (it's a section of 2x4, another scrap). It’s much thicker on the bottom than the top also, which was a challenge to frame. In the end, I made the frame as deep as the thickest part of the painting (about 2“), and used a .25“ spacer in between the painting and frame, instead of my normal 1/8”. That set it off enough.

At first thought this painting was really boring, but in the end I really ended up liking it. It’s a great size, it feels very substantial and solid, more like a sculpture than any of the other ones I’ve done. And my sister liked it too.