I was at the lab in the morning just checking on things and doing some web-surfing when I came across something which really excited me... Sculpey(tm).
Sculpey is a polymer clay which comes in many different varieties and colours and which you can twist and mould to you heart's content. On finding that there was a supplier of Sculpey at a nearby art supply shop I immediately left the lab and cycled on down. I picked up about 2 pounds of white Scupley clay and came home very excited. I had been inspired by Miskatonic.net which had shown how to make small and large sculptures for Call of Cthulhu. So naturally the first thing I turned my hand towards was the "Elder Sign".
That turned out moderately ok, but I soon wondered what else I could make. As it turns out, in our current CoC campaign we have a character who is being tracked by a "Dimensional Shambler" a rather nasty creature from outside known space. To make the body I scrunched up aluminum foil into a roughly humanoid shape and then covered it in clay, this makes the piece easier to fire (in a conventional oven) and uses less clay. I then went to work making it rather ferocious looking and remarkably I did a pretty good job. (Pictures to come hopefully)
Sculpture has been somewhat of a painful memory for me. In my first two years at boarding school I possessed quite a good imagination and I let it run rampant. But as my frustration about gender and isolation built up, I increasingly began to burst into tears at the slightest thing. One day in Year 8 (1988) we were in art class, and we had to build a wire structure of an animal and then cover it in bandages wrapped in plaster of Paris. I wanted to make an ant, but what I had in my mind was never what would come out of the twisted pieces of wire. I became more and more frustrated and when the art teacher asked how I was doing, I just burst into tears in front of the whole class.
Next year I did not take art.
The scars which boarding school left on my soul are deep and many-fold. In one of our soul-searching conversations, Allison suggested I see a psychologist to deal with it. The deepest problem is that I can no longer cry any more, instead my bottled frustration can only spill out as anger and hurt those close and dear to me. I have to break through the years of conditioning and reach back to the frightened little child.