Caveman Al focuses on miniature garden sanctuary — for 3,150 hours Posted by Jacob Buckenmeyer | May 16, 2012 | 525 views

Take a look around your room. Pay attention to the minute, accidental details that make your room unlike any other — a cracked electrical outlet or a book left open on a stained wood countertop.

Look long enough and you’ll start to notice textures, colors or shadows you’ve overlooked every day for years, but you still won’t see things the way Caveman Al does.

Al just completed an elaborate 12-inch sculpture, containing more detail than most 24-square-foot rooms. The project took one year and 85 days to create. He said he logged 3,150 hours at his work bench.

Al has been creating imaginative miniature scenes for more than 70 years. He recently completed “Rock Island,” a tiny garden sanctuary surrounded by acrylic epoxy resin “water.”

The sculpture is in 1/24 scale — a foot of real-world space is represented by a half inch of Al’s handiwork.

Everything is to scale: lily pads are a foot (0.5 inch) wide, fern leaf stalks are two feet (1 inch) tall. Flowers and cattails rise from the pond floor and grow out of the minute crags of his sculpted rocks.

As with all his artwork, Al created each aspect of the island from raw materials — cutting sheepskin vellum for plant leaves and twisting wire to make the stems.