Sticky Situation

I consider myself a funny person. I'm also a scout, and the weekend before this project was given I was youth staff for an adult leadership training course and was assigned to the antelope patrol. Naturally that led to me creating a gilded antelope head with sticks for antlers mounted on a tree cross-section.

Honestly I can't remember how I came up with the extravagancy of this thing. I just remember one moment I was at a loss for ideas, the next, the antelope existed.

I knew I had to make the antelope as accurate as possible, so the carving material would be key. I figured styrofoam would work okay. The ears were made of floral foam (which was a lot easier to form) and the head and neck with regular styrofoam. I'd never carved anything before, but I had a lot of fun with it and I certainly want to do it again.

(Me too, antelope... Me too...)

I thought I would have to look at home or in the woods for some good sticks, but the trees outside the art room bore two horn-worthy twigs. 

Next was the wall. I wanted to make it look like it was mounted on a section of wall cut right out of an old cabin. I took some old scrap wood held together with brackets and stretched my homemade wallpaper over it. Now that was fun to make.

The stencil was hand cut from a simple fleur-de-lis. (Another nod to scouting) It was repetedly spray-painted over a piece of raw canvas which was then hacked at by a crazy girl with a box cutter once it was stretched over the wall.

Then came the painting of the antelope. Ugh. Nope. Noooooooooope. I think that poor thing went through four or five different coats of paint before I decided on the gold. You know, it was blue at one point.

closer...

closer.......

There we go. Blue antelope.

It was eventually painted gold. I did so because it kind of worked with the brown and cream tones already in the background, but was definitely bolder. Ms. Sudkamp and I thought about it for a while.

Anyway, the point is that this project had a lot of elements which came together exceptionally well. I really love working three-dimensionally and had a blast doing so with this thing. It's gaudy as crap, but in a good, ironic way.