Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Day 20: Work in a new way with clay

Well this project didn't go off quite how I hoped. I have some paperclay, which I'm really not very familiar with using at all. Initially I wanted to do a kind of flat clay picture, and by flat I mean it would have some dimension and depth, layers of clay for foreground and background, and I found out that paperclay just doesn't do that very well at all.
In fact, I can't get it to do much that looks really good, although the big buttons for the 'Coraline' project came out well. So instead of a 3D picture of the golem from this book on a bridge (with Vimes nearby), I made an actual golem, which is supposed to look patchy and cracked. They're ancient, and have repaired themselves with patches of clay so many times the original shape is blurred into a big humanoid mass without much features.
This golem is named Dorfl, and he's on the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. I should have made him a badge. The top of his head is a separate piece and his head is hollow, ostensibly for a place to put the scroll with the holy words that keep him alive, but Dorfl is unique in that he no longer needs those. Instead, the top of his head comes off so I can shine a LED flashlight in and make his eyes glow like they're supposed to.
Glowing eyes!
'Feet of Clay' is another book in the Discworld series, and the entire book revolves around golems, which are made of clay. Not paperclay, but that's largely wood pulp, which is even closer to something organic and living than dirt, maybe. Either way, the prompt of clay made me think of Dorfl, who is living clay, and who would point out that it actually makes him a lot more like us than we might want to admit.
At the end of the book, the priests band together, outraged that he is alive without holy words to control him and give him life. They tell him that he is not even really alive, to which Dorfl says:

"This Is Fundamentally True, I suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom Of Life- However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process."

Needless to say, there are no volunteers.

2 comments:

  1. Love the glowing eyes -- a great touch!

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  2. Thanks! I actually wish it had been more effective, but maybe if I took the picture in a darker setting... I was already doing it without the flash.

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