Wax Realisations

 When looking at my wax and my reference I came to some realisations that influenced my work. 

For the petals, I needed to have more than just a single layer of petals as sunflowers have lots of petals closely packed. The petals on a sunflower also don't appear to be attached to the center when viewed from the front so when I attached the petals I did it from the back. The blue wax was quite stringy so I will need to clean up the back once it is cast. 

The center needed to be hollowed out to reduce weight for casting. I am unsure about the stipple texture that I might add more dots or add a texture over the stippling as there is so much space between the dots but I want to see how it will look in metal before deciding.

Bowes, K.,(2021). Incomplete wax flower.

Bowes, K.,(2021). Back of flower.

Sunflower Center

 For the center of my sunflower, I didn't want to leave it blank. I also didn't want to just texture it either as I know that sunflowers do actually follow the Fibonacci sequence. 

I wanted a stipple texture on the center of my wax flower so I printed a Fibonacci Spiral (Fig. 1) to scale and used the transfer method I came up with while working with Cortney to mark the dots on the wax. 

Bowes, K.,(2021). Stipple Pattern

Figure1- Fibonacci Spiral

At first glance, the dots look randomly placed but they do follow the Fibonacci spiral, I drew over my photo to make sure as it can be difficult for the eye to pick it up.

Bowes, K.,(2021). Illustration on photo

Experimenting in Wax

 Using my drawing and photos for reference, I attempted to make my first sunflower out of wax. I used the blue carving wax for stability and the black modeling wax so that I could sculpt each petal individually.

Bowes, K., (2021). Wax experiment.

Bowes, K., (2021). Sculpted Petals.

Sunflower earring design

My original design was inspired by a set of detailed ceramic tiles. I originally designed an earpiece using the tiles as a reference but I used a generic flower. I redesigned the earpiece using the image of a sunflower I grew as a reference.

Bowes, K., (2021). Sunflower

Bowes, K., (2021). Sunflower Illustration

Bowes, K., (2021). Sunflower earpiece

Earring illustration

I have been helping at Phil Bear Jewellers with building wax trees and cleaning up castings. While working I came across these small flower castings that inspired me to illustrate the earring/earpiece that I observed within the floral tiles. The illustration was done on a tablet using ArtFlow.

Bowes, K., (2021). Flower casting

Bowes, K., (2021). Illustration

Floral Tiles

Bathroom tiles that I keep saying look like an earring/earpiece. I also love how the floral image looks almost like a watercolour painting with a pen used for detailing.

Bowes.K., (2021). Bathroom tiles grid image

Bowes.K., (2021). Single tile