When studying your stone, and planning how to best fit your maquette into the marble, you need to remember that you are drawing in Three Dimensions. This is easier said than done when you consider that you are dealing with an irregular shaped block that most likely has flaws.
Stone is a reductive artistic process, once you start to chip, there is no going back. So the Maquette is used to keep the chisel on track… More on that in my next section on blocking out the marble statue. Up to this point, months have been invested working on the design and emotion of the smaller Maquette. And so in order to preserve the value of all the work, a plaster casting has been made and then a clay copy has been pressed or poured. More months of effort.
A statue of this size (two thirds life) needs weeks to dry before it can be fired. If there is any residual moisture left in the statue, it will surely crack as the water is vaporized and steam pressure snaps the clay apart.
In fact, there is no practical way to fully dry your clay piece outside of the kiln. The “green ware” will always retain the ambient moisture that is all around us suspended in the air. There is no escaping the relative humidity in the air you breath. Continue reading
