Thursday 25 October 2012

Poker Hands

For my 3D class we had to do a sculpture in plaster. A large majority of people seemed to be doing hands because it was the most accessible and manageable thing to work with, but I didn't want my piece to seem like every other person's piece that used hands.
I had no clue what to do yet even after creating one hand but an awesome idea came into my head one morning that made use of the hand that I already created: hands playing a card game. I wanted to do something with cards, such as hands shuffling or performing a magic trick, but I wanted to make use of the 3D space and how a sculpture is usually viewed in multiple angles. So with mine there are 3 ways to see it:
- The poker game in progress
- Player 1's perspective
- Player 2's perspective
Which is the reason why the hands end at the wrists, so it's as though the viewer takes the role of the player that they're looking at (thank you FPS games, you gave me inspiration).

Also this year they've been lecturing us about installation in most of our classes, so I wanted to be creative with that as well.

Anyway here it is:









As I was setting up my area a classmate of mine suggested the jackets on the chairs and even helped me set up a more intense game than what I had since my knowledge of poker is very very minimal. During critique it was suggested that I put it in the end of the year show (YAY!) with some changes such as:  green felt on the table, preferably a card table (I originally intended for this but didn't have one), black and red jackets on the chairs (to match the colours of the cards),  and poker chips (I was going to do this but I couldn't find any cheap poker chips since I didn't want to waste my money on something I would never use). I will definitely make the presentation much better at the end of the year show, which I'm still pretty nervous about.

Progress photos:

We had to cover whatever we were going to cast in wax first. Unfortunately no photos of my hand covered in wax because my other hand was covered in vaseline (which we needed to apply before the wax). Here's the wax mold filled with plaster already.

Then when the plaster had hardened, you take off the wax and voila! Any holes had to be filled some plaster then I sanded it down. 

2 comments:

  1. Hey Marco,

    That looks pretty cool. Some random thought:

    If you only had 4 cards turned over then it might seem more interactive and tense because the outcome is not known, people might look at both hands and then try to figure out what the "right" thing to do is.

    The chips could also add to the story, like one player is almost out, or it is even and this pot will be huge.

    If you put the deck beside one player then it would seem like that player is the dealer and then the next decision would probably be on the other one, so they could be pushing chips in or something.

    Now I kind of want to play poker haha.

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    Replies
    1. I don't know much about poker haha, so I had to google some stuff about it. But I originally intended one guy to be all in with his poker chips with a crappy hand or something like that as though he was bluffing.

      My original idea also included several other players but due to time constraints and some unfortunate issues with mixing plaster, I only got those 2 pairs. But I said during critique that it kind of worked because it was more of like a showdown and it felt more intense.

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