Steampunk Raven Sculpture

When thinking of what to make my friend for her birthday, I thought about creating something funky for her house, which is now being renovated.  As we both kind of lean towards "the dark side" I picked up some raffia covered wire and started to play around with a framework skeleton of a raven.

The raven symbol is a good luck symbol in some cultures, while others find it to be a creepy and unsettling symbol ala Hitchcock's "The Birds."  Me? I think of them as kind of a mix of all the iconic imagery, and a good place to start for my steampunk gift.

I started to bend the wire into the raven shape, much like a dimensional contour drawing.





Then, I spray painted the covered wire black.













Next, I began to build up the "skeleton" with gears and twiddly bits to replicate eyes, vertebra and the layers of the birds wing feathers.

Overall the effect is steampunkilicious, I think. What do you think?

What Drives You To Create?

 

 

 

I received an e-newsletter from Weaving Today and the title was "What Drives Us to Weave?"  It's an excellent post and I would encourage everyone to read it for it discussed what drove the writer to take up the craft.  It got me thinking (as any good post should) about what drives those of us who live to craft and create artwork to actually work on art and crafty projects.

For me - a large part of what drives me is the desire to create something.  It's not just making something fun - which every project I do inevitably is - but a real need to make something from nothing.  It doesn't matter if the material is foodstuff, beads, yarn, eggs, paper, paint or any other of the myriad of possibilities. The actual act of creation is what I'm driven to accomplish.

I also find that when I am not able to work on something I can get very "testy" (as my better half so carefully puts it).  Leo actually asked me just last weekend when I was going to paint again.  Now I don't know if he was genuinely curious or if it was his way of saying "you need to chill out!" but he was absolutely correct in questioning me.  Life can get away from us as we rush here and there trying to get as much accomplished as possible so it doesn't all pile up into a huge mountain of things that have to get done. The whole process of creation makes us slow down to consider the possibilities of what we are making and how to make what our imaginations have come up with.

So my question for this post to all of you out there is - What drives you to create?  Post a comment below to start our conversation.

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