What is It?

Our Creative Piece is a model of Francis Bacon's head, except that the top is cut off, allowing one to see inside of it. On the inside are pictures representing different things about him and aspects of his life, with colorful fish tank rocks as filler. On the outside, there are larger physical representations of the pictures inside of it.

The Beginning

It didn't take long for our group to decide on what we should make our creative piece. On the first day of researching, we found, in a book, that he basically had two sides to his life, the political, and the scientific. With this in mind, we thought, "What if we got a bust of him, painted it to look like him, cut it in half, and then filled each half with things representing the two sides of his life."

Design Decisions

After we finished researching, and began writing our blogs, we also discussed how we were going to make this idea happen. Our initial idea was to make a bust out of clay, but we decided that it would take too long to make, would be too fragile, and too heavy. We then turned to other ideas, like papier mâché. However, we decided that would also take too long to make, and might not cut very well. We finally settled on using a styrofoam head, which Matt then ordered from Amazon.

The creative piece was then put on hold for a little while, until we finished our topic blogs and source lists. When we finally returned to it, we deliberated a little bit more on the design. We agreed on a horizontal cut above the temple, and that the head would be placed on a circular stand, with larger representations of what is in the head.

Making it

Then, we began making it. We started with Matt, at home, using a saw to cut the head in half in the designated area. When that was done, we brought it back into school and borrowed Mr. Charest's xacto knife to begin hollowing it out. Dominic and Chet worked to hollow it out, Chet with the xacto knife, Dominic with a plastic spoon. Unfortunately, Chet sliced his index finger on his left hand with the xacto knife, delaying the process by about half of a class. Once it was hollowed out, Chet brought in paint and paint brushes to paint it. Jason, being the most artistic of the group, painted on the facial features, while the rest of us painted the normal skin color, hair, and inside of the head.