Description
Inspiration for my Large Hedgehog
The original casting of my first hedgehog, the little hedgehog ornament, was modelled to commemorate a little hog named “Millie”. She was overwintering in a friend’s shed. They were both volunteers at the Hedgehog Preservation Society and so a little silver hedgehog was the perfect surprise gift from her to him.
Hedgehogs are interesting creatures to model and I found them technically challenging – especially the smaller one as she was one of my earliest models. There are so many ways that you could end up with it looking like a blob with a snout! So I plumped for one in a nice sitting position, where the beauty of the face could really be appreciated. The spines were the biggest challenge: Firstly in working out how to best represent the spines while keeping the design true to the actual creature; and secondly learning how to persuade wax, which naturally forms smooth curves, to go into sharper spikes.
The large hedgehog presented a new set of challenges as, due to the scale, I had to use a different type of wax which requires carving from a block of wax, as opposed to my preferred method of building the wax model up from scratch.