Soap Carving:Emphasis Sculpture

Soap Carving Fun

 Carving bars of soap can only be considered good clean fun! One of the projects my cub scouts looked forward to was the day they got to carve a bar of soap into whatever they wanted. They soon learned that carving soap took more talent than you might think.

So where did carving soap get started? What prompted people to spend their time carving soap? Is soap carving really an art?

Hand carved soap flowers were first carved in the village of Chian Rai, in Northern Thailand. Villagers began carving soap as a hobby in the evenings after their work was done. These soaps were then sold at the evening bazaar along with other handcrafted items. Since carving soap added to their incomes, carving soap became a profitable pass time.

As carved soap caught on in popularity, others began trying out their artistic abilities on bars of soap. In order to carve soap, it has to be soft enough that it won’t flake or break off while you are carving it. The soap making process must be just right for your carving project to be a success.

Most of us think of soap as a temporary medium, and wouldn’t really consider it as a medium for art, yet many artistic things are made from glass or other fragile mediums. Soap carvings are usually done in miniature, limited in size to the bar of soap used. On occasion, larger works of art have been made from soap.

The world’s largest soap sculpture was made by Bev Kirk for the Ivory soap making company. She sculpted a winged pig which she titled “Sudsie, A Boar of Soap.” This was carved from a block of soap five feet by five feet by six feet, and the finished sculpture weighed 7000 pounds.

I remember my mother having pretty soap flowers by our bathroom sinks. They were so pretty she wouldn’t let us use them! She considered them a work of art worthy of display.

None of the soap making carvings made by my cub scouts would merit status as great works of art. Even so, we all had a lot of good clean fun creating them. Who knows, with practice, maybe someday one of my cub scouts will become a famous soap making sculptor.

Tags: soap making, supplies

                                Paul Klee:

Artist for Art Two 

DUE: next week

Self Portait Of The Artist 

Paul Klee (German pronunciation: [ˈkleː]; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a Swiss painter and a German painter.^[a] His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism.^[1] Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered color theory, and wrote extensively about it; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered so important for modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance.^[2][3][4] He and his colleague , the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humour and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

[edit] Early life and training

Assignment: Draw a work of art in the style of Paul Klee, Look at this example in black and white with an animal.