About Me

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Unique metal sculptures handmade in Australia. Suitable for indoors and outdoors these Teangi's sculptures feature nature and animals. Teangi also creates custom pet caricatures - immortalising your pet in steel.

Sunday 26 June 2011

Where does it all begin?

A lot of people ask me "Where do you get your ideas from?". Nature is always my answer. There are so many gorgeous animals out there that I would love to make... if only there were more hours in the day.
I have a huge 'to do' list - its comprised of so many different animals I would like to portray in metal.

But how do I go from a thought to sculpture?
Well there is no exact science to it but I can give you an insight into the first 'process' that gets me started and in later posts I will take you trough the full journey.

Firstly if an animal takes my fancy I start out with research - looking at books, images, reading about the animals and, if possible, observing it in real life.
I then start to sketch. Now here's a thing... I am a sculptor not an illustrator! I don't sketch so that it looks good... I sketch to start getting a feel for the way I may design the sculpture. As I have been doing this, over time, my sketches are becoming less realistic and I am now almost missing a step and going straight to drawing the animal 'styalised' and moving towards a sculpture design.

I then continue to draw the design until I can factor in the limitations of my material (there are many!). I just keep going until I get a design I am happy with that I know will work in metal.
Sometimes it ends here... sometimes I have designed and never made, sometimes I have designed and come back to it months later to take it up again, sometimes I have designed and am making the very next day. That's why I describe what I do as 'how long is a piece of string'.

So that's my rainy, cold day work... designing, drawing and adding a little bit of luck and hope!

Here are a couple of examples of sculptures I have finished recently and how they were portrayed on paper before making their way to metal.
This little lion began with this sketch here and he pretty much ended up as he started out on paper.    


This penguin was sketched over months before I came up with the eventual design. This sketch is the final sketch before I made the end sculpture pictured.

In the future I would like to continue the 'Where does it all begin?' journey and take you from sheet metal to a semi completed sculpture 'shape'.

In the meantime if you would like to see more my my work visit my website.

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