Apologies.  It's been nearly a month since I last posted.  I worked on the forearm for about a week, then didn't get much done over the next few weeks as "life" was happening to me from every direction, but I've been getting back up to speed this past week.  I finished the arm up to the wrist.  Really happy with the way it turned out.

Those two unresolved wires you see coming off the top of the wrist then became tendons leading up to the first knuckles of the index and middle fingers.

The hands are going to be slow going.  I'll be using a lot of the really thin sprung steel wire, as I want the hands to be more delicate, and as I've said before, the sprung steel is really hard to work with.  I also decided that since I'm not going to be doing the other hand for quite some time, it might be a good idea to make knuckles for both hands at the same time to keep them equal in size.  I know that once this hand is finished it's going to be next to impossible to get inside there to match the knuckles, so I've now shaped all fourteen knuckles for each hand.  This week I'll start adding the little lines at the bends.  That too, will be very slow going.  A lot of small wires and lots of grinding.

I also started putting a little focus on the base this weekend.  I had originally planned on using grassy/mossy fun fur to cover the base, but realized that after a year of working on this thing (by the time I'm done), putting fun fur on the base would completely cheapen all the work I've done.  To be honest, I never really liked that idea anyway.  It was just sort of the first thing I had come up with and I hadn't really put much thought into it since then.  Over the last few weeks, however, I decided to wrap the base in patinated copper.  I've never worked with copper or patinas before so this was a really exciting idea to me.  I went to Industrial Metal Supply this weekend and picked up a roll of thin copper foil and a few different patinas, and began experimenting with them.  I did some cold applications, some hot applications, mixed colors, reworked pieces and altered the colors some more.  It was a lot of fun.  This was the first batch of cold applications and alterations.

So far, this is my favorite.

But this is a close second.

I'm going to play with them a little more this week, but I need to put my focus back on the hand.  I'm going to be heading out to Burning Man in two months and I'd like to finish this hand and the other arm out to the elbow, then get a good jump on the face before I go.

Speaking of Burning Man, I've been so focused on this sculpture for the last eight months that my annual pilgrimage has been quietly sneaking up on me.  I guess this year's ticket fiasco plays a part in that too.  So many people that would normally be going didn't get tickets, so the usual pre-playa chatter has been oddly missing this year.  Normally I start getting amped up and start having little playa flashes around mid-March, but it just hasn't happened this year.  Until today.  I was hit with a flash of art cars, donwtempo electronica in the distance, and the smell of burning wood.  And there I was, on the playa, for a few short seconds this afternoon.  Two more months.  In honor of that, one of my sunrise songs from 2010, which I was just listening to a few nights ago while I was working on the knuckles...