Merry Christmas Eve to one and all.

Another Christmas project I have had in mind for a very long time is to make a collection of snow globes, which seem like a suitably festive object.

I had envisaged a series of invented fairytale stories, but the reality is that each project just takes so long that I have only managed to make one (and even that was a compromise), and it turned out that snow globes are really hard to make and look good, at least if you have no experience.

I will definitely be returning to this idea. I feel that, with the right resources, this project still has huge artistic potential.

This scene depicts a wolf howling in the blizzard. I also intended it to have a wild girl howling right next to him, to create more of a narrative, but having struggled with the wolf I realised that the girl would probably be beyond me at this stage, and also I didn’t really anticipate how small the space is in there and should have planned it out better if I wanted that extra elements. It’s a story I might come back to though.

The scene was sculpted in Super Sculpey, and painted with acrylic paints. It’s all set in a chutney jar filled with baby oil and silver & blue glitter. The next step will be to find a way to set it into a chunk of wood, but I just haven’t had time yet to do this.

I really see this as a first experiment/ sketch in a project to keep developing, and here ae some lessons that I learned:

1. Check the size of the jar before making the base. My wintry rock fit perfectly onto the template of the lid of the jar, but unfortunately I hadn’t left enough room for the lid to screw into the jar, so I had to break some bits off to make it fit.
2. Fill the thing right up. There’s a disatisfyingly large air gap at the top of this one.
3. Elevate the scene. I would have liked my wolf to sit higher in the globe.