Blog #2: Instant Sculpture, Stanley Sculpture

The word of the week is shape!

When the assignment was described to use anything around your house to build something I sat down at first and was thinking what I could do. I have always loved being in the kitchen since I was very little. I would do anything from helping my dad make pancakes to helping my mom cook a meal. I then thought, I love being creative in the kitchen so I am going to begin forming a sculpture there. I began looking around the kitchen and saw the top of the pineapple. I thought immediately that would be hilarious hair! That’s when the idea struck me to create a creature and a new friend. The next thing I began to think about was the body of the creature. I thought a potato would work well but it didn’t look right. My mom had an extra sponge and she was about to throw it in the garbage and I realized that the sponge would be a perfect body. I thought it would be easy to use tooth picks to hold everything in place if I used the sponge. With all of the materials I chose, I used many toothpicks to keep everything secure. I began looking in the fridge and used broccoli as legs and cauliflower as arms. Then I found pieces of green pepper and thought that would be a cute smiling face. There were strawberries in the fridge so I wanted to use strawberries as a body part. I cut the end of the strawberry so that it would be a point, for the nose. I really began to get on a role and kept thinking of ideas. Now I had the hair, arms, legs, mouth and nose. I then went to the cupboard and looked to see if I could find material for the eyes and eye brows. I used marshmallows for the eyes and melted chocolate chips to make pupils for the eyes. Then, for the eyebrows, I heated macaroni noodles to make them soft so the toothpicks would go through. This is the combination of different materials that I used to create my unique creature. Finally, after describing all about my creature and his features I would like to introduce you to the one and only.......Stanley Sculpture!!!!! 

When I decided to make Stanley, I wanted to use the artistic element: shape. The different materials I used were hard and soft objects, big and large objects, small and little objects, and most definitely realistic objects. By using vegetables, fruits, marshmallows, toothpicks and a sponge I could let Stanley have a great figure! Stanley's body parts are non-geometrical because they have an irregular shape. They are natural objects that are not standard triangles, circles or squares (Schirrmacher & Fox, 2009, p.140). This allowed Stanley to have a unique appearance.    

I feel this creature represents the unique creativity that I have. I wanted to make something that would make people smile when they looked at the creature. I find it looks silly but very cute. Every part of this creature was thought out carefully and I took my time to build a fun sculpture in the kitchen. I really enjoyed making my sculpture and hope to make another sculpture in the future to experiment with other materials that could create something unique as well. (maybe a friend for Stanley!) 
Children would love creating a creature out of fruits and vegetables. If I had an activity like this in my classroom, I would bring materials for children to use to make a healthy friend. I would probably bring potatoes for the children to use as the body for their creature. When making their creature I would teach them the different components that relate to shape, healthy eating and body parts. Each child would discuss and explain their creature to the class focusing on the appearance of their character and why they used the specific materials selected for the body parts. I think the children would thoroughly enjoy this activity and develop the concept of shape.


Schirrmacher, R., & Fox, J.E. (2009). Art and creative development for
         young children (6th Ed.). Belmont, CA: Delmar.