Art Day

[madbaker]

We spent yesterday at Tim & Laurie's place doing Art. (Get your minds out of the gutter.)

Dawn brought materials and a handout on how to make a coptic-bound book for them to playtest; unfortunately they were busy with other projects, so she didn't get to watch them fumble through it. I spent the day making a horn hammer. For such a simple project, it took a lot of time:

1) sand down the horn point to a round tip
2) carve a hole in the base of the horn the size of the hammer handle
3) ditto the top of the horn
4) carefully work the wooden handle into the horn, trying to avoid splitting the thing after working on it for so long
5) drive in the wedge and metal stabilizer
6) admire!

"Okay," you may well be asking, "why on earth would you spend hours making a horn hammer when there are perfectly good wooden and metal ones out there for easy and cheap purchase?"

And well may you ask.

Ah, you are asking. Well then, here is the answer.

It's a tool to make leather masks (in my case, generally for commedia, although I've made one superhero-type mask - The Raptor). Tim and Jeff have made several, but I want to be self-sufficient. Even more important now that it takes an extra hour to get to their places. You start by forming the mask out of clay on a pre-existing life mask of your face (okay, I suppose that's really step one, but I've already got mine...), then making a plaster negative, filling that with concrete to make a positive, then stretching wet leather over that to make the actual mask. The horn hammer is used to mash the leather surface and make it stretch more.

Obviously I think this whole process is very cool. It's something that I've been able to do, and I'm art-impaired.