Sculpey-ing at the ISCA con...

I sat with some very talented lady sculptors this year at the ISCA con. While I'm nowhere near as accomplished as they are,  we all find it enjoyable to take a lump of Sculpey and make it into something recognizable and amusing. 

Myself, Johanna Veerenhuis and Celestia Ward start our pieces. Celestia already has the four members of the ISCA board roughed in on her...board. :-)

Johanna chose to do one spectacular figurine, of our new ISCA president Steve Hearn as Elvis Presley. 

(Well, we were in Las Vegas!) Click to see a video of Johanna sculpting a hand.

I decided to do a relief of another tablemate, Jeff Redford, (who is also an accomplished sculptor) since he made an especially good model--being just a few feet away!

 Here's a close up of mine:

I learned quite a bit about this discipline from my friends that I plan to put to use this coming year. I wish I hadn't painted my Jeff in quite the way I did (no more high gloss paint for skin--you'll see in a later photo) but I was pleased with the likeness...

Below is a later stage of Johanna's:

And this is Celestia's final touches: ( screws, nails, scratches, etc. )

Being a LV native, Celestia generously shared her home oven with all her friends (aka competitors) as Sculpey needs to be baked at a low temperature before painting or glazing. Thank you, Ms. Ward!

We also shared our space with another gentleman who is very handy with the sculpting tools, Karel Op de Beeck. He made an amazing wine bottle holder of Lar De Souza, for which he allowed me to do the calligraphy on the faux wine label:

Below are all the Sculpey pieces as they appeared for voting. Celestia managed to pull off another entry of three colleagues who had each lost a huge amount of weight over the past year, for a total of six likenesses in two sculptures. (It would have been seven, but Lorin Bernsen made an appearance in both!) The long-necked fellow on the left was a last minute entry by Ellen Lustig, who came over to join the Sculpey fun on the final competition day. 

 The final pieces!

My piece requires a little bit of explanation. Jeff has worn high-top Reeboks for many years, but they don't make them anymore, and he is on his last pair... :-(

Congratulations to Johanna with her first place win, and Celestia with her third-place finish. Second was taken by an exquisitely done pair of shadow boxes by Beejay Hawn, which I'll have in another post.