Some of my work in progress got derailed over the last couple of weeks.  It's my own peculiar creative process that's to blame this time.  Experimentation makes up a large part of the way I work.  My work space is cluttered with all sorts of materials I've tried and rejected for my artwork.  The other week I was just sitting staring at one off my in progress works trying to decide if it should just be tossed on the scrap heap when a light bulb went off in my head.  Staring at abandoned materials on my desk I started to wonder what would happen if I mixed a couple of them together.  One of the materials was drywall compound which cracks way to much when it dries to be of any real use to me and the other was a pre made, just add water, product called paper clay (basically papier mache) which I found to be way to coarse and slow drying to be very useful.  Mix them together and you get something closer to the middle of the two.  It's still really messy, but not so coarse and it no longer cracks.  For my larger works it seems to be a better product to work with than the air drying clay.  The paper clay fibers and binders help to strengthen the material and it will bind directly to other surfaces.  It's one main drawback is the drying time.  I'm probably looking at about a week for things to dry all the way through. 

Up to this point my work required a bit of assembly.  The clay portions had to be mounted to the panels.  Now I'll be able to sculpted directly on to the surface itself.    So some of my work in progress have become "test pieces" to try out some new ideas.  So far so good.  I've got a number of larger 23" x 36" ready to start as well.