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He's done! I have a work in progress somewhere in the forums showing the wooden part of the birdhouse and the wire armature. This is for m grandfather, who does similar-themed artwork just for kicks--faces made of hypertufa (a mixture of cement and peat moss that I could NOT get to solidify properly--mine's straight cement) on inverted trees, giant bugs made from tools, etc. Enjoy. Comments and all that are welcome. This is my first real work with cement--I've done chests and trees and such with sculpey and GS. Cement is....different!

Figured I'd finally post some more finished items! Pardon the long post, but there's a lot of info to get across and to beg of any experts in the realms. A little background first: My grandfather makes sculptures (purely for fun, though he does give them away and build them on request) starting with upturned cedar trunks and building up from the roots into cool old man faces and other whimsical things using a mixture of cement and sphagnum moss (a.k.a. peat moss). He actually makes a lot of different sculptures, but they're not related to this topic. ;) For his 80th birthday this year I began work on a special something (progress in the soon-to-be-posted WIP thread) for him. These faces are my experiments with a) my own hand at sculpting with a macroscopic cementitious substance (ie: Reaper forums.... The next largest thing I've sculpted was a 55 mm tall gelatinous cube and a 47 mm tall hearth) and b) to figure out the proper mix for this stuff. He told me he uses a 1:1 mix of cement and moss (similar to the recipe for hypertufa), but when I tried that it ended up crumblable in my hands. Shown are a wizard (1:1 mix of mortar and moss) that will more than likely dissolve in a few months, a demon face from pure cement that will outlast my house, and a vague face (cement, moss, and a bit of sand--still came out crumbly). Enjoy my little creations (these are about man-hand sized)! Also, has anyone any experience with this medium? Any advice would be HUGELY appreciated!

I posted some images of my sculpting attempts in the Show Off threads. This is the main body and armature for a birdhouse for my grandfather's 80th birthday. He sculpts in the medium of cement and sphagnum moss and builds fantastic faces on cedar roots (and other fun creations). My dilemma is that, while this needn't necessarily be a functioning birdhouse, I'd like it to not weigh 75 pounds in the end. So I'd prefer to lighten my cement mixture with sphagnum/peat moss. But whenever I add even the slightest amount of moss, it turns the end product crumbly... So I've finished this guy, my first cement sculpture, not my first birdhouse. I went with pure cement (fine) with a dash of mortar to smooth it out more. Took me a while, but I think Gramps will appreciate it. I know I'm not a world class sculptor or anything, but this was both enjoyable and challenging. Working with cement (ie: fighting gravity and hydroflow constantly, as well as dealing with occasional too-large chunks) was very strange, having worked with only GS, apoxysculpt, sculpey, and Play-Doh. If I did it right, you should be able to tell the emotion I was trying to invoke in him. Any questions, comments, suggestions, critiques are welcome! Cheers!

I just completed another novelty vignette for my private collection...I have titled it (The Streets of San Francisco)! The figures used were (Hasslefree - Old Man # HFV005 and Reaper Young Lady # 50157...Townfolk/Ladies of the Night). Hope that you find it as cute as I do!

Here is a pretty quick paintjob of the old couple from Hasslefree. Since they will be villagers in any tabletop game we play, they only got my tabletop standard paintjob. The cat is from the crazy cat lady set I think.