Augustmas

It’s August.

The sun is shining. The kids are still off school. People are eating ice creams and going on holiday.

So naturally, at Making Trails, it’s Christmas...

Welcome to Augustmas. Thanks to the lovely Lynn Hollingsworth for the title!

There is currently an army of gonks taking over the workshop, sleighs being sculpted and fibreglassed, paint everywhere, and an alarming amount of discussion about snow, baubles, Nutcrackers and festive colour palettes.

And this is only the beginning.

The gonks have officially moved from production into painting, which means our rows of slightly ghostly looking characters are finally starting to acquire personalities. Over the next couple of months, Karen and Lynn are joining me as we work our way through painting the entire gonk army.

Meanwhile, our sleighs are very much coming to life too.

What started as sketches on a page just a few weeks ago are now becoming full sized sculptures in the workshop. We’re sculpting, moulding, fibreglassing and finishing them here before they too join the painting queue.

We even had a rather funny afternoon discussing exactly how much room adult bottoms versus kiddo bottoms need to sit comfortably, so we could make sure we got the width right.

Yes, I measured the seated bottoms of several willing volunteers (High fives Tracey and Ben)

It was an odd day.

Ten sleighs. Ten completely different Christmas stories.

By the time most sensible people start thinking about Christmas, we’ll have been living in it for months.

That’s the funny thing about this job. Public art trails might appear almost magically in towns and cities, but behind every finished sculpture are months of messy, noisy, painty making.

Right now, we are very much in the messy bit.

The workshop is full. The coffee is flowing. The Christmas music has not yet been permitted, but give it a few weeks.

Happy Augustmas from Making Trails.