I once took a Sculpture class. The class was scheduled to start on the first day of the spring semester but it was a hybrid course where we wouldn’t meet the professor until February! Until then the class was expected to submit tasks online. The professor had to extend the online portion due to personal reasons, and It wasn’t until March that we met on campus! My other classes started the first day of the semester so I got used to the coursework of only four classes and underestimated the time I had to work on my Sculpture projects. I noticed I was running out of time when April came and I was less than halfway done with my assignments! Thankfully, my professor guided me all the way through and taught me that preparation is crucial to constructing a good project.

The design I was working on was a series of masks that held significance to me because I research all sorts of masks from throughout history. For this assignment, I chose five historical figures whose lore aligned with my identity. Among them, I chose a wolf which is symbolism as independence, and loyalty. I drew concepts of masks keeping in mind dimensions, color, texture, and form. I ordered plastilina clay and built my mask from scratch using clay and shaving off chunks and pieces of clay to add the details within it. I then cast the clay in plaster so that the mask would create a negative plaster mold. For the rendering phase, I chose to use beeswax!

I chose beeswax for several reasons; I wanted a simple material to work with since I didn’t have much time, I wanted to use a non-wasteful material, and I wanted the material to be easy to manipulate, so beeswax was the obvious choice! I melted the wax and applied dish soap to my plaster mold as a releasing agent, and then I poured the wax into the liquid soap-covered mold and waited about 45 minutes for the wax to solidify. The result was pleasing! I still have the mold for this mask, and the four others in my home. I really want to experiment with food coloring mixed into different types of wax to see what they would look like after casting!