Yes!  Just had a fantastic weekend.  Incredibly productive.  I worked til 5am both Friday and Saturday nights and hit a huge milestone.  After a little over two months on the project so far, I finally finished the legs! 

That not only means that I get to move on to her torso now, but also that I no longer have to kneel on the floor all night to work.  My knees are thrilled!  I even added a few feet of pipe to my speed rail rig tonight, raising it to make room for the next round of wires.

I spent the rest of tonight shaping the hips.  Haven't quite found the lines yet, but I'm close.  So far, the two thick wires from each leg have been confined to only interacting with each other as they moved up the leg.  Now they split off from the hip, and one from each leg meets in back to make her spine, and the other two move to the front to make her ribcage and meet at her sternum.  Not sure how far I'll get with those this week.  I have a lot to do to get ready for Christmas this weekend, but then I have most of the next week off, so I'm ready to really throw myself into it.  Super excited.

On the downside, I peeled back a considerable amount of my thumbnail tonight.  I was using channel locks to bend the hips and it slipped off the wire and smashed into my thumb at just the right angle to tear back about a quarter of the fingernail.  Ugh.  Thankfully it's holding steady at a dull, quiet thud right now, but I have a bad feeling that's not going to last for long.  Bummer.

Oh well.  

And the obvious music selection for this post...  She's got legs.

Hey there.  Been a while since I've posted.  I went to visit my folks for a week over Thanksgiving, and have been working feverishly on the piece since I got back.  I've made some serious progress so I figured it's time to take a moment and get caught up on here. 

When I left town, I had the right leg done from the knee down, and had been working on the foot and the shin of the left leg.  My plan was to jump back into the second leg when I got back, to try to even it out with the first leg.  I made the knee and did a few touch ups effectively finishing the shin, but when I moved around to do the calf, I realized that given the angle of this leg, it would probably be best at this point to secure the legs.  That meant committing to the point where the two thick wires from each leg would next meet, the hips, and then joining the two legs together at the crotch. 

This left me at an awkward spot.  With the groin in place at the top of the unfinished legs and nothing else around it, it's pretty exposed.  As the rest of the body builds up around it, it won't be as visible, but right now... yeah, it's pretty exposed.  For the first few days, any time anyone walked in, it was the first thing they noticed, then they'd sort of look at me with one eye squinted, like I was some sort of degenerate.  It was pretty uncomfortable, but now I just ignore them.  It'll be fine once I start working on the torso and fill in some of the space around it.

Now that the legs are shaped and secure, it's considerably less chaotic without the wires splayed in every direction.  There's an added dimension to it as well, and it's officially one piece now, rather than two separate pieces! 

Rather than jumping back into the second leg, I decided to finish the first leg completely.  I started working on the front of the thigh first, and after a few nights, had almost finished it, when I realized that something had gone terribly awry.  The lines of this section were supposed to follow the muscle, but instead looked like she had gills on her leg.  Not that having leg gills wouldn't be cool, but it's not at all what I was shooting for.  It's always a bummer to have to pull out the saw and undo even one night's work, let alone a few, but when you know something's not right, unless you want to spend eternity looking at the piece and only seeing the part you don't like, you have to just butch up and hack it off.  So after three or four days of working on that section, I cut the entire thing out, ground down all the leftover wire stubs, and started over.  This time it totally clicked and looked a thousand times better. 

Once that was finished, I then moved around to the back and started working on the back of her thigh.  When I reached the top of the leg, I had to make an end point, so I added the line of the underside of her bum.  I also screwed up a small area of the back of her knee, so I had to cut a few small pieces out and redo that as well, but that went pretty smoothly, and as of this afternoon, not only is the first leg done, it now looks great.

I still had a few more hours left in the day, so I committed to the second hip and started working on the front of the second thigh.  There's enough of it done now that you can really get an idea of how the finished piece is going to look.  I'm thrilled with it so far.  Crossing my fingers that I can keep this up.

I took a three day weekend from my day job this weekend, as Friday was the ten year anniversary of my first night sculpting.  I made a special playlist for the day with 12 of the cds I was listening to on repeat those first few magical months.  I hadn't heard some of those songs in ages.  I miss those warm gooey sounds of the early 00's downtempo, and they were a perfect soundtrack for my weekend.

 

Alex Gopher's The Child.  One of the first electronica songs I ever got into.  So good.

 

Soft Music Under the Stars.  The first Fila Brazillia song I ever heard and probably still my favorite.  I love the sitar, and this song is so dreamy, and appropriately titled.

  

Manana, by Cristophe Goze.  More sitar.  This was the song I would use to introduce people to the purple seahorse the first time they came by the warehouse I was working in.

And Uschi's Groove, by the Ballistic Brothers.  So many great memories to this song.

So many more I'd love to add here, but I think four is enough for now.  It was a great trip down memory lane though, listening to all those albums back to back.  Definitely good fuel for the work at hand.

Stay tuned for the next update!