HANDCAST PAPER ELK

The son of a good friend of mine asked me if I could make a handmade paper elk in the same way I had made the dragonfly hollow tree his mom had purchased. The captions of my process are below each picture. I have included process pictures of the elk so far below the Dragonfly Hollow photo that inspired the Elk piece.

Process in creating the Elk are shown below:

I used air dry clay to sculpt this on a plexiglass panel. It is no more than 1/4" in thickness so that the paper can be molded without  tearing. I used a picture I found of an Elk grazing on Flickr and got the photographer's permission to use it. The photographer is known as Suzanham on Flickr.

The picture of the Elk I used for this inspiration (found on Flickr and used with the photographer's permission) after I isolated the Elk from the background of the photo. This is the image I used for sculpting the air dry clay form. Also shown are the papers I collected from my scraps to tear up for the paper pulp.

This is the torn paper pieces soaking in water to soften them for the blender.

This is the vat of paper pulp I created. You can see that I left a lot of bits of paper whole to add texture and a variety of color.

Paper pulp cast on clay form and worked over (painstaking process of removing water gently and getting the paper pulp to hold the shapes).

Finished piece of paper shown (yes you can actually pick it up and hold it even though the image is embossed on the clay form and 3-dimensional). Next I will begin completing the collage...since this is a grazing elk, I will add bits of dry moss for grass, and then I will do some things to bring the form out some more. Every time I do this, I can't believe I can do this....LOL