I was sitting in the study with my daughter and we were discussing art. After a while we decided we were in the mood to make something ourselves so we sat for a time looking for inspiration. My eyes kept being drawn to the fluffy quilt of talc-like ash in the fireplace and I started to consider how I might incorporate that into my piece. The discolored white ash conjured foreboding thoughts of the contrast of stillness after a roaring fire: grim, dour, spent, desiccated, dust. I started to imagine scenes that I could use the ash to accent, maybe the landscape of a monotone wasteland, or the mountainside asunder under the silhouette of a dragon arching and straining to expel its fire upon it, and then I thought of simple portrait of a skull and ultimately went with that.
I started by sketching from reference material a life size skull on canvas. I taped this off and applied a black lacquer. I was then going down the road to tape off the reverse and spray glue and apply the ash but wasn’t certain how to not end up with something featureless; I wanted depth. I had the crazy idea of using a glue gun and just started “sculpting” the skull with layer upon layer of hot glue. The teeth immediately took on the perfect effect with an opalescence that I could have never anticipated; good thing I had a white background and not black under it because I had initially regretted not starting with a black canvas! The high bones of the eye socket and jaw immediately created the shadows necessary to extenuate the form the way I had hoped. Once hardened, I taped off the skull from the background and hit it will alternating layers of spray glue and ash dusted onto it. Once dry I crushed some of the darker pieces of charcoal found in the ash and used that to dust into the relief areas to bring even more shadow.
I’m quite happy with the result and think the hot glue technique is one definitely worth playing with more! But it needed a frame….
Initially I considered 3d printing a very gothic frame with lots of filigree and lace patterns, but it just wasn’t coming together the way I wanted. I then noticed on the side of my workshop I had some discarded old hardwood flooring pieces. I ran them through the planer and they were good as new. I ripped and routed a couple pieces, layered them up a little to generate visual interest and after mitering together a frame and staining it up, I think it turned out to be the perfect frame. I think the richness of the wood, one that was salvaged from decay, provides a better accompaniment to the skull than some plastic goth nonsense.
And there we are:
