Instalation Art Piece

I wanted to share some photo's from the first even installation art project I've ever worked on. My work in any kind of art medium has been almost entirely in puppet building, so I was very excited to try my hand at something a little different. I'm not sure exactly what to call this piece, but it was built to help promote literacy at a local school. I built three characters from popular kids books and posed them around a tree that already existed in the school lobby. Scaredy Squirrel, Chester the Cat and Flat Stanley were the three characters that were selected. The scene is basically the three characters having just finished decorating the tree to welcome the kids back to school.
Here is what the tree in the lobby looked like before I got my hands on it. An interesting looking tree and a good base upon which to build. It's mounted on a cork board in the main entrance to the school.

The first thing I did with the tree was add leaves. I figured that might help make it look more tree-like for starters and I wanted to create a summer/early fall scene...not so much the dead of winter look. The background was originally made of felt cut-outs, an elementary school classic - I wanted to try and freshen it up. Here is a shot with added leaves and the start of a background. I used foamcore stapled to the cork board and then filled the joints with regular dry-wall filler. You can also see the beginnings of background painting.



The characters I built to sit in/around the tree were not built like any puppets I'd made before. I was inspired largely by character sculptures I've seen in theme parks and in the Disney store. For example the Big Bad Wolf and Three Little Pigs in this picture. My assumption is that the sculptures found in Disney stores are mass-produced and cast from molds in fiberglass. The characters I built were built in a slightly different way.

I started with blocks of Styrofoam and sculpted the various body parts to the characters. Next, I covered each Styrofoam figure with Creative Paperclay. It's a really cool product to work with because it can we worked quite thin over the Stryofoam with water and dries very light. It can be layered quite effectively and you can then sand and paint it quite easily. Here are shots of the Squirrel, Cat and Stanley's head during this process.









Once the figures were sculpted and dry, I proceeded to add other details. A furry tail on the squirrel, fur onto Chester and a very flat set of clothes on a very flat body on Stanley. I then added props and air brush details to finish them off in the workshop before loading them into the school.





















Once all the parts were loaded into the school, I was very happy with how it turned out. I added some additional props (fence, ladder, flowers, airbrushing on the tree) during the load in and I feel that the details really brought the whole thing together. From all accounts the kids were very excited to see such a unique art piece in the school on the first day, and I understand that the staff at the school was also very happy. Here are some pictures of the finished piece.