I admit it, the hardest part of making metal art for me is putting away my tape measure, level, square and dividers. The first thing a fabricator does when he gets to work is clip on his tape measure. Sometimes he does it at home because you can’t even do the first thing without it, you can’t cut any parts and you wouldn’t know where to put them if you could. It’s the most important tool they have, and they don’t like to share it either. If you go out to the shop and need to measure something, its best to find your tape measure you forgot than to borrow one. Shop guys may let you have it but they’ll be nervous the whole time. They’ll reach for it on their belt out of habit and if it’s not there, well, it’s not good.
When you're making metal art you may have to measure some things but the more you measure and straighten and level…..the less true it looks. It’s a phenomenon I have discovered the hard way. If I want to place 4 legs on a pig, I can measure and measure and when I get it tacked up and then step back to look……. they’re crooked. I must have measured wrong I think and measure again, but nope the measurements are true. I used to get frustrated by it so I decided not to fight it and started “eyeballing” it. The legs started to be straight and look natural. I started building everything “right side up”, eyeball the legs and eyes and ears and it all came together.
There are probably several reasons for this that are easily explainable. The items we work with are all salvaged. They’ve been bent and dinged, and most are damaged in some fashion. There’s just no spot to measure from and while 12-5/8” around the circumference at the front gives you the center, the back is now 12-11/16” since it's been dropped on its head a few times. That 1/16” at the base isn’t much but by the time it gets to the end of the leg it can be a half inch and look wonky. So measuring is hard and made harder by the condition of the material. Then you have to account for mother nature. I’m sure she doesn’t have time to measure every creature’s legs to make sure they are even. She tends to their power, and endurance. She makes sure the cats have enough spring and the ducks have enough webbing on its feet. They are all straightish and levelish and evenish, but she doesn’t worry about that. Neither do I…….now. I get down to a level where I can see and tack on a leg, then another and I step back and eyeball it. Half of the time I pull one back off and try again. When I’m done though, they pass the eye test. They look natural. Not only do they look better but I’m sure the animals are much more comfortable with legs and feet that fit them personally and not some assembly line, prefabricated, one size fits all legs.
This also goes with another discovery I made which is that the closer I try to make a creature with real life dimensions and looks, the worse it comes out. The harder I try to get the proportions right the more bad it looks. (The more bad it looks? I'm leaving it because that's how I talk, much to the chagrin of my grammatically correct wife.) My goal now is to have people know it's an art pig and smile at its charisma and character and not look at it like a poor copy of a perfect design. So, I ask myself to let the force flow through me, think less, apply welds where needed and grow this thing unpretentiously so it gains its greatest stature. No tape measure needed.
Comments