What's the point of the Egyptian Links?
All the links I've sent through
today are flying buttresses to the
cathedral of your Egyptian effort.
They aren't there as the body, but for additional support.
One thing that always made me crazy was when artists and craftspeople
would make something that was "foreign" to them, and that includes
Japanese people and their interesting interpretation of the Wild West
in their specialty saloons, that without home work, the outcome is
impressionistic.
Impressionism is nice and has its place but it's a spell buster in
miniatures.
What's a spell buster? Ok, we weave a spell with our mini scenes, we
invite the viewer to suspend disbelief and come into the mini scene.
We want folks to believe they are "there". If our mini food looks
like
seagull caca, it's a spell buster. If our dolls don't have a forehead,
it's a spell buster. If our Egyptian minis are impressionistic...put
them on jewelry, don't put them in a mini scene, for it bust the
spell. There's a wider latitude of behavior accepted in jewelry, it's
expected that Japanese or Egyptian stuff is impressionistic. In a mini
scene it just doesn't wash.
Before we enter the mini realm of Ancient Egypt seeing the real stuff
is necessary, as is studying the mythology, knowing which rulers
instituted what major changes, like King Tut's dad, the whacked
Akhenaten, it helps us capture and replicate artifacts and rooms in
miniature and not break the spell we wish to weave.
Some folks might say, "What do all these links have to do with polymer
clay?" Well this isn't just a polymer clay list it's a polymer clay
miniature list and we have certain limits we have to work within:
realism and scale. In the process to capture realism we need to do
homework. We're not making this stuff up. Miniaturists are replicating
what has been, just making it smaller is all. If someone made effort
to put together a scene without doing homework they'd have an
apartment like Sandra Bullock in "Demolition Man", what she thought
was a perfect 20th century apartment was her impression of what it
should be, Sly Stalone was being nice by not telling her where she
went wrong.
Now if you do fantasy, or futuristic scenes, then you can do what ever
you please. You can have an Elven neighborhood in trees or some post
apocalyptic wasteland. You're making the stuff up out of your head,
it's not miniature replication of real stuff from a real time.
When we pick a real time, a real culture, there's a bit of homework
that is needed if your stuff is going to ring true to the viewer. Even
if the only viewer is you.
So that's my motive for running all these links through the list.
Sharing websites that go over information that I think might be
helpful to capture realism is easier than my typing the stuff up my
own self, why reinvent the wheel?
++++
Rest of the Post is quoted in the Blue Nile
Lotus page.