Giant Concrete Dog Polystyrene / Styrofoam Carving by Sculpture Studios

Welcome to Sculpture Studios. Working on an oversized dog for this video, a very popular request since we've moved into our new unit, and this is going to be an installation piece for a war memorial performance. Now dogs wouldn't be something that one might normally associate with the world wars, but this is to recognise and commemorate all the dogs that participated and sadly died in the battles over the years. We've been sent a visual of a German pointer sitting in an upright and very prominent pose. The idea is for the dog to be carved at three metres tall and sitting on top of a one metre high plinth. The sculpture has been commissioned by David Rudnick, a designer that collaborates a lot of his work with that of electric music producer Evian Christ, and this work's going to be displayed at their trance performance at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. On to the build itself now. We're beginning by blocking out the base which is being created in an octagon shape. The whole sculpture, including the dog, is going to be carved from polystyrene and finished with a light render of a flexible concrete to represent a heavy solid statue. For the purpose of budget, and the fact that we believe this is only going to be used once for a single exhibition, these are the reasons that we're not going down a more durable glass fibre route with this. Working seriously hard already, we're going over with a grey base layer of concrete so that any layers on top of this, if they're rubbed back or knocked, they'll have a grey undercoat to begin with. We'll do the same with the dog later on before any artworking takes place. When scaling up the dog from our concept images, we're going down our normal route of gridding up a large sheet of polystyrene so that we can create a side and front on profile. As dogs are normally viewed from above and physically looked down upon, we're making very subtle changes to the design so that this still looks correct when viewed publicly from below. Tweaks like elongating the neck slightly so that it won't look as though the head's sinking into the shoulders are just a few things that we're considering when creating this. Here, Chris is blocking out the basic form, referring to the concept images at all times to get an accurate representation of what the client's after. The design also needs to be symmetrical on both sides, so this is another reason why it's important to follow the design exactly so that this can be replicated. At this point, we've invited David down to the studio to run through any design changes or tweaks that he'd like to make, and this is always an important step at the polystyrene stage. Once the design and any changes are confirmed, we can proceed to finish the sculpture and send any final shots via email for David to approve. He's also brought down the concept for lettering of the front plaque, which we have cut by machine so it's nice and neat. While this is being made, Chris is carrying on to finish the dog, so we can start on the concrete render. Right, here we've got the lettering for the dog plinth. It's all been laser cut out of a piece of MDF, and what we've done, we've scored the back of the wood so that with the bonding paste, it should adhere to the dry-bit material, and we've also added tiny little blobs on each of these sections where when the letters come out, all these pieces need to remain in the right position in order to make the letters. This tape here held all the letters in the right place while we laid the board down. You can see from all these tiny little diamonds, these should all come out, and all the letter pieces as well, and what we're going to do once we've taken all these out, the whole thing's going to be dry-bitted again, I think, so that this blends in with the rest of the plinth. Right, here's all the text with all the pieces taken out. A couple of these middle sections have to be re-squished into position just so they stay in place. I've got a pot of dry-bit here, the same colour as the base itself. We go into all the detail first of all, just to make sure everything holds in place, and then go over the front so that the whole base blends into one. It's quite a difficult font to read, but I think that's kind of half the point. You've got to take your time to look at it and work out what it says at first, and heaven holds a sense of wonder. Okay, so here we have the back of the doggy. That's the back profile, which sits about there. We have the side of the doggy. That's what we have at the end. Here's the dry-bit concrete render, not only giving the sculpture a grey base layer and a slight shell to make it stronger, but it also removes the polystyrene bead texture as well. We go over this with several layers of dry-bit in different shades of grey, steady, and this allows us to sand the concrete back to give it a mottled and rough concrete look. When the whole sculpture is covered, we accentuate the detail of the carving using water-based emulsion paints that sink into the material, and we darken the deep spots and highlight the high areas. Rubbing the concrete back when it's dry and solid like this does take a lot of time, but it's worth powering through at this stage to achieve the right effect for the client. When all the work's complete, the dog and the plinth are wrapped up to be transported to London. We've managed to grab a few clips here from the internet of the trance night of the ICA to include in the finished video. Now the dog's apparently been christened as Aiden, that's a true story, hopefully that's meant as a compliment, but we hope that Aiden the dog was a good representative of all the canines that unknowingly gave their lives during the war. We'd like to thank David Rudnick for coming to us with the project, and who knows, perhaps Aiden's been moved on to a new location after the event as a proud figure for the cause. Please feel free to leave any comments below, as they're always appreciated, and hit the subscribe button for our latest videos. You can like Sculpture Studios on Facebook and follow at Aiden Hines on Twitter, and for more of our work visit SculptureStudios.co.uk. Thank you very much for watching. Aiden! Here boy!