I began the modelling stage by making two small maquettes in clay, which I then cast into strong dental plaster.
My idea was to make two columns of figures based on the maquettes. These would be about 3m in height.
The columns are comprised of the figures repeated at many differing scales, and so I would need to invent a means of scaling the maquettes. . .
Looking at the maquettes, we can see that there are contours marked in pencil onto the surface of the plaster. These are indications of the method I used to scale the original into all the different sizes of figures required for the artwork. These horizontal lines that circumscribe the figures (best seen in the upper image) are 6mm apart. At each of these levels I took a beeswax template (like a collar) from the profile. The collars retained their shape after removal, and I was able to use each of these to trace a pencil line onto paper to show the shape of the figure at each precise elevation (40 per figure.) I then was able to feed these contours into my computer to decrease or increase the scale as required and print out the new drawings to enable me to make each figure. I transferred the contour lines onto 18mm MDF for the larger figures (decreasing thickness for the smaller figures) and jigsawed them out. I also cut a vertical ‘spinal’ contour, and carefully attached all the horizontal ones to it…
Into the gap between each horizontal contour I troweled polyester resin paste (car body filler) as shown above. ‘Twas then a matter of overlaying this basic structure with more paste – according to the formations of the muscles of the top halves, and the draped sarongs that covered the bottom halves of the figures…
Once the larger figures were finished, I was able to transfer the fine anatomical detail to the smaller figures by scaled measurement…
…until such times as each smaller figure was completed…
Each figure stands on a tapering plug that fits snugly into a cavity at the neck the of the larger one below…
But the uppermost few figures were too tiny for that approach. Note the little wooden proportional calipers, which were set to the golden proportion. Each figure in the columns is 0.618 scale of the one immediately below it…
