Wow, great weekend.  Had a lot on my plate during the week, so I didn't get much done, but I dove into it Friday night and made up for it these last few days.

As I said in my last post, I used the thicker wire for the underside of the foot.  I then added one more length of the thicker wire on each side, creating the arch on the inside and the edge of the outside, meeting back at the Achilles tendon.  These will soon turn into the calf, running up to the back of the knee.  Turns out, this should be the last of the thick wire I'll need for the feet.  By the time they met at the heel, the base of the foot was pretty strong.  I think if I use the 1/8th for the rest of the foot, it should strengthen up enough to hold up the piece.  Especially with some of the weight distributed back on the second leg.  So that's great.  The 3/16th is just so clunky looking for something like this.  I'm definitely going to try to use as little of it as possible on the rest of the piece.

On the other end of the spectrum, when I started working on the toes, I decided to use some of the thinner wire, specifically the .078, and realized that all three of the thinner gauges I got are sprung steel, not mild steel, which means they don't really like to bend.  I may have to see if I can find some thin mild steel somewhere or else just figure out how to finesse this stuff.  In the end, it did, with a fair amount of effort and a little swearing, work nicely though. 

When steel gets hot, its surface oxidizes, changing its color, so for every single weld, I not only grind down the weld itself, but also up to an inch on each side of the weld to get it back to its intended shiny and textured surface.  It's tedious, but it's looking really good.  Lots of grinding though.  Hopefully it'll ease up a bit after I get out of the small, cramped curves of the toes.

So, standing here at the tail end of the weekend, I have a foot and five toes well on their way.  A friend once described my sculpting as pulling magical creatures out of one plane of existence, my imagination, into this physical, tangible plane of existence.  I always liked that description.  By that line of thinking, my next sculpture has literally dipped her toes into the physical realm.  Exciting times.

One more thing... If you know me at all, you know of my disdain for television and my deep love of music.  Music is such a huge part of my process when I'm sculpting.  The energy it creates moves through me, physically and emotionally, and then comes out in the wire.  It sounds a little hoaky when I try to put it in words like that, but if you know what I mean, then you know what I mean.  So given that, I've decided to start posting an occasional song or two that happened to get me in my groove while I was working that day.  Here are the first two from this weekend.

Groove Armada's Chicago.  An oldie.  This song never fails to up the volume on my stereo and transport my brain to the playa.  Good song to work to.



And Cryogenic Dreams by Phutureprimitive, a song I just got turned onto and couldn't stop listening to this weekend.