Celebrating Shark Week 2012 With A New Sculpture

It's been awhile since I've sculpted a shark. And since August 12th kicks off the start of Shark Week 2012 : Shark Week : Discovery Channel I thought it was the perfect time to return to one of my favorite subjects! It is always fun rummaging through my reference materials hunting up shark photos.

Finding a carving pattern for a Great White shark would help guide my work.

Making the armature for my sculpture out of styrofoam would save on clay and weight!

Mounting the styrofoam sections on aluminum wire which is bolted to a base.

Cutting the styrofoam to give the shark a gentle curve.

           Starting to add Apoxie clay.

Tracing the fin pattern onto my clay fin.

Fins ready for carving and refining.

Pectoral fins and dorsal fin primed before final sanding. I'll be posting more photos as work on my Great White shark sculpture progresses.

Blue Mohawk For Charity

 I've mean meaning to share the pictures of the mohawk I recently got to help raise funds for The St.Baldrick's Foundation for childhood cancer research. Brian Blacknick - A St. Baldrick's Participant


The first thing we had to do was bleach my hair so the blue dye would show more vividly.

After washing out the bleach my wife Diane sectioned off my hair to try and get a straight mohawk line. Not an easy task since I have 3 or 4 cowlicks struggling for control of my hair growth pattern at any given minute!

Diane used a nylon artists brush to apply the Special Effects Blue Haired Freak dye to my hair. After 30 minutes I washed it out. Whoa! My hair was some kind of major blue!
I thought it was a little too long for a mohawk so my Mother and Diane snipped away to try and get it the right length.

The ladies used what styling gunk they had on hand but the "hawk" wouldn't stay in place!

The next day I picked up a tube of Got2b glued spiking glue. The tube said "screaming hold". They aren't kidding! A little of this stuff and I had a gravity defying mohawk in no time. I probably could have run head long into a wall and not dented this bad boy!

I wear hats a great deal of the time and I haven't figured out how to pull that off without flattening my mohawk. It might need to be taken down another notch or two!