Recently, I’ve busy making up orders and producing work for various galleries, but this week I’ve finally started on a new Hare sculpture!

As a ‘one-man-band’, I can go for months spending time on ‘reproducing’ my work to sell and so when I can find a window of time to actually ‘sculpt’ something new, like this Hare, and get wax beneath my finger nails again and get my brain focused on designing…it’s a wonderful feeling and time flies!

I’ve intended to sculpt a life-sized Hare for a year or more, and so this week after getting all my current orders completed, I made a start on the ‘maquette’. This is a quick 3D sketch in wax, all in proportion but with minimum detail, and its purpose is to work out the composition of a piece before working up the full sized piece.

Working from reference photographs I spent just an hour and a half on this 4″ high study. My aim is to have the Hare looking at the viewer and to position it in such a way as to make it visually pleasing in terms of its shapes and lines, from all angles. I’ve also always liked to show the underneath of the paw when I sculpt animals, and the lifted front leg adds interest to the composition. I tend to also like the body to follow a graceful ‘S-shaped’ curve…

I put this little video of the Hare maquette (see below) on my Kirsty Armstrong Sculpture Facebook page a couple of days ago and it has had a very encouraging response, so I think a new Hare sculpture is definitely a good idea!

This new Hare sculpture will be sculpted in wax, and once it’s finished it will be moulded by a local company and then produced in cold-cast copper, bronze or pewter. I will receive the limited edition casts back and then polish and finish them by hand. This Hare will be just about life-sized, and so it will be fairly big! It will be in the same style as my red squirrel pieces; life-like, intricately detailed and with my unique stylisation of the texture. More soon…