Materials: Wooden box, CelluClay, acrylic paint, sealer spray.
I thought it would be cool to have a box with hands wrapped around it. I got the idea by picking up one of those wooden boxes at an art store and holding it like the hands in the finished piece.
The hardest part of this project was building the sculpture in a way that the lid could still open easily. I applied wet CelluClay to both sides and then closed the lid with some aluminum foil in between. Once things dried I ground it and added refinements, and kept repeating this process until it looked about how I wanted.
The hands are the star of the box, but I knew I needed to figure out something for the back. I didn’t want the hands to just amorphously emerge from the back of the box. After some thinking on various designs I decided to go with the simple solution of wrists and a triangle shape to separate them. The wrists aren’t proportional. Yes, that bugs me a bit. But if they were proportional I think it would throw off the design.
Because of the weight distribution of CelluClay, when the box is empty, and the lid is open, it stays upright but wants to roll over. If I were making this again I’d tweak the base a bit, either by making it a different shape, or adding some weight.
It took a while to paint. I used a lot of thin layers of watery acrylic paint. This is one of the earlier projects I used this technique on, so it took me a lot longer than it would were I do make it today. Finally I sprayed it with some gloss sealer.
Part of the fun here is that it’s still a functional box.