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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!

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!