How to build a sculpture out of pipe without being limited by things like logic or safety.

Step one was to buy 30 feet of 2" Sched 40 carbon steel pipe and laboriously cut it into rings with a sawzall because chop saws either leave too many burrs or the blades are too expensive. Also the wider the blade the more material gets wasted on each cut.

step 2: make the head first because you're an amateur and heads are surprisingly difficult to get right. Once the head is complete you can use the height of the head to calculate the dimensions of the rest of the body. An average adult male is 8 heads high, but i wanted to make as tall a sculpture as possible with the least material possible, so i made a starving man of heroic proportions (9 heads tall)

you can see in the last picture that i roughly sketched out on the wall the location of different body parts, and now here I'm just welding a frame that corresponds to those points. I usually just free weld my sculptures and decide what looks good as i go but it turns out a tiny bit of planning is better.

with the sculpture against the wall i could only really weld the front and it was super flimsy at this stage so i built a little support to hold it up.

now im just developing the legs a bit because the sooner it can hold itself up the better.

Im essentially just tack welding the rings together at this point because i have commitment issues. People understandably have questions about the gender of my sculpture because the concave stomach makes the chest look bosomy, but its a totally a man.

what about that little package you say? surely such a tall man would be more well endowed. Well im glad you've brought this up. Originally he had a monstrous male appendage that was a foot long and had a 2" circumference shaft with a considerably larger head but that looked overly pornographic and i wanted this to be family friendly so i tried to make an unremarkable little bulge. moving on...

finally he's self supported and i can get that stand outta my way.

doing the arms here, watch your eyes

worked on the ground for a bit, filling in spaces and more completely welding the joints that were more critical to its structural integrity.

got super sick of crawling around on the floor, so i put it at standing height, but that made flipping it over a lot harder. the finished sculpture weighs about 130lbs but it was already pretty heavy at this point.

Construction complete, overhead door for scale.

brought it around to the side of the shop, white walls, better contrast.

I wasnt that happy with how it turned out, kinda ugly, but i wasnt about to let this thing i'd spent all night making just rust

so i started painting it.

ran out of blue so i ended up just finishing off a bunch of different spray cans on it, just to protect it from the elements

Getting uglier by the minute but I'm still going. Nobody makes good art all the time, and when you're learning its important to just push through even when you're tired and it looks way less cool than you had imagined.

this is really the only good perspective, kinda looks like he's saying "What?" so thats what i named it. I had these grand notions at the beginning of making a starving hero that was representative of how complicated it is to do the right thing in a world designed to disconnect us from the consequences of our actions, but when the end result wasnt worthy of the concept i changed the name.

caught a cool shadow of it while transporting it.

and now some birds play in it sometimes. The End.