Driftwood Art - The Grey Octopus
A sculpture of an Octopus using driftwood as the primary material. Other materials used for this sculpture are coconut shell, tree bark,and acorn shells.
HEIGHT 8"/LENGTH 15"
The Octopus was a very fun piece for me to make. It began with a really interesting piece of driftwood that I had been studying for probably 6 months, trying to figure out what it looked like. It was a small driftwood tree stump, which doesn't really look like many things in the animal kingdom. It wasn't until I thought of the ocean that it occurred to me this could be an octopus. Fortunately, the size of this tree trunk was a perfect match for a coconut shell head, which I had already used as a head piece for my owl sculpture. From there it was just a matter of finding tentacles, webbing, the siphons, and the eyes. For the webbing, there aren't many materials that could be used for such a thing, and birch bark is a great material that can be molded into shape to some extent, and it has good durability. Acorns were used for the siphons as they were the perfect size, and I decided to switch from my usual stone eyes and do something different. I was glad I chose acorns for the eyes, I have never had so much difficulty with eyes as I did with the octopus, and all the fine tuning I had to do with the acorns would have been extremely difficult and time consuming if I had used stone. Some paint staining is added for color matching as well. As with all my pieces, prior to assembly, all parts go through a cleaning and heat treatment process, and the final product is coated with a light sealant.
