Ibex Ryhton project

Haven't had time to post anything new in the past few weeks since kids went back to school (you'd think I'd have MORE free time with them away all day but it's been back to back appointments and errands with hardly time to breathe in between!) Anyway, here's one I've been meaning to post all summer - since school let OUT at the end of last year in fact.

James had a project to do for reading class that involved them selecting a piece from the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art online gallery, and writing a report on it, as well as recreating the artwork. He chose this sculpture from the Ancient Near Eastern collection - we thought it was really interesting and didn't look too impossible to sculpt a replica. We worked with some plain white modeling clay and used an empty plastic water bottle as a form since it had almost the exact shape as the ibex's body. He sculpted & painted it and it turned out great (even though parts of the body had to be retouched several times due to cracking, and the legs had to be made a bit shorter & thicker in order to support the piece) but probably the best part was during the weeks we were working on it, there was an episode of Planet Earth that featured a short bit about ibexes, and also one day I noticed a posting by a Flick'r friend of mine - of a sketch she did of a similar Iranian rhyton from a museum she was visiting. Pretty cool to be able to relate these random snatches of info to an actual project we were working on at the time.

All the artwork the kids made was displayed at school the rest of the year and I was bummed to think we wouldn't get it back, but! turns out on the last day of school they did get to take their artwork home. Only problem was - as much as he KNEW I wanted that sculpture back (I'd been asking about it almost daily the last couple weeks of school) what does my son do but shove the thing randomly into his backpack (!!!) and didn't even tell me ... of course the horns were both broken off but luckily were swimming around loose in the bottom of the bag. I set it aside to be repaired and then summer promptly got away from us, so I only tackled it like the week before school started up again. ANYWAY! Here it is, with horns reattached and a fresh coat of paint - and shown compared to the original version from the Met's website photo -
(you maybe can't tell for sure, but - ours is the second one, hehe)

Not too bad for a 4th grade project, I thought! and one of the more interesting ones they've gotten to do - and now it sits proudly on my shelf, my very own piece of ancient sculpture. Take that, Met!
So thats all I have time for today, have a good one ...
~ gem ~

**UPDATE APRIL 2014**
Ok, so as of right now, I am going post-by-post through my blog and fixing all the broken image links (since I deleted & quit my Flickr account, all those pictures went *poof!* here, obviously) LUCKILY I actually still have most of them - but in this case I had to take a new photo. And the fourth grade kid who made this project (that I obviously still have, and still display on a shelf in my art room - even though it has since lost an ear and suffered more horn damage ...) is now nearly a 17 year old high school senior. Whaaaaaaat?! SIGH :*)