How to Start a Wire Sculpture

Video Transcript

"DEB HUGLIN VOGEL: Hi, I'm Debbie "The Roboteer," and I'm here for Expert Village to make a wire lizard in the way that Sandy Calder taught me, where it's just one piece of wire. So it will have lots of kinetic energy and tensile strength. What we've got here is some nice heavy wire, and we're going to put a little bend in it so it doesn't stick me. And you always want to put a little kind of a hook bend in it so that you can work with it and it's not going to hurt you. With the wire sculptures, you want to start by just twisting that a little bit 'cause we want to make the head. Lizard heads are a little bit longer so we want to have a kind of a long head. And on this lizard, I'd like you to be able to see the eyes. So I'm actually going to make a couple of curly cues here so that he's got his eyes on top of his head. I can use my pliers then to bend them back out. So here's our lizard head. Now, the lizard has a neck that's about the length of his head, unless it's a really long lizard. And here's where we going to want to bend it and go on to the shoulder."