Revenge of the Worms

Finally, this piece is done! I still have a bunch of other unfinished assignments from this past semester that I hope to finish this summer, so there'll be others too. The assignment was to create a "pattern" and break it. So, wanting to do something with animals, I came up with the idea of having a pattern-type landscape of worms strangling a robin. I chose to go slightly more cartoony with this piece than I've probably ever done for an assigned piece, which was challenging because I wanted to make sure that the bird looked like it belonged with the worms. To come up with reference to work from, I found a bait and tackle shop and bought 3 dozen worms. I cleaned the dirt off of them under the sink and started arranging them on a board so that it would look like there was a fairly deep sea of worms. I quickly made a small bird out of a kneaded eraser so that I could wrap the worms around something, and later I sculpted a larger robin out of sculpey, photographed it under the same lighting, and then resized it in Photoshop and worked from that bird. Done in acrylic tube paints on gessoed crescent watercolor board 115.
9.75" x 14"
? hours. wow, I didn't keep track at all, but I'll guess around 40 hours
spring semester/summer 2006