Just a quick update.  I finished the second arm up to the elbow and started working on the forearm.  Tricky matching the diameter and circumference of the first arm, but I think I got it so far.  It's looking good.  Onward!

Started working on the second arm this week.  I'm trying to match the design pattern of the first arm to keep them symmetrical, but this arm is in a different position, creating different planes and angles.  Like the first arm, it took me a few days to really find those first few lines and dial them in, but now that I found them it seems like the rest is starting to fall into place.  Hopefully I'll hit my stride again this weekend and work though it pretty easily.  I don't want to get too cocky, I just started it, but I should be able to finish the arm and maybe even the hand before burning man. 

One of my friends and mentors stopped by this week to check in on my progress.  He hadn't been by in a few weeks, so it was his first time seeing the hand.   We chatted a bit about the sprung steel and how I was having a hard time working with it, but I couldn't find regular mild steel rod that thin.  He broke me off some amazing knowledge.  He asked if I had tried heating up the spring steel.  I explained that my experience with heating up steel has been iffy at best.  It's good if I'm trying to bend a tight curve or a sharp point, but if I'm trying to get nice smooth curves, it just doesn't work that well.  That wasn't what he meant though.  He told me that if I heat up the sprung steel rod and let it cool slowly, it would soften up the metal.  !!!  I tried a test piece tonight and it worked pretty well.  Some of the curves were still a little chunky, but it was a *lot* easier to bend.  I'm going to do another test piece this weekend and try to heat it a little more evenly and see if that makes any difference.  Even if tonight's experiment is the best I can get it, it's still going to make the face a thousand times easier to shape.  So that was a nice surprise.  The face is going to be tricky enough without having to fight the wire.

I'll probably bring the mannequin head out to the desert with me and start drawing on it seriously while I'm out there.  The madness and beauty of the playa should provide some good inspiration. 

That's all for now.  Hopefully I'll have some cool pictures of the second arm soon.

Well, it took me a few weeks, but I finished the hand this past weekend.  It was without a doubt the hardest part of the sculpture so far, but I love the way it turned out.  As expected, working with the thin, sprung steel was a real challenge.  I must have burned through ten pieces while trying to weld them, and bent as many more into weird unusable shapes.  In the end though, it was worth it.  I managed to pull off the "lazily curled fingers" I was trying for.  The photo doesn't do it justice, but you get the point. 

This means two things.  First, all that's left is the other arm/hand and the head/hair.  And of course, the finish.  But that's it.  And second, this means I've finished the highest point on the sculpture.  Hopefully I can spend less time on the ladder now.  I already knew I have bad balance, but it was painfully obvious having spent most of the last month almost falling off the ladder while trying to grind and weld.  I'll probably need it a bit for the hair, but the other arm is positioned much lower than the first and I won't need it for the face, as I'm doing that independently from the body and then attaching it at the neck.

I also made a decision over the last few weeks that's going to result in a pretty big change for the finished piece.  I decided I'm not going to chrome it.  Instead, I'm going to patina the whole sculpture.  I'm still going to wrap the base in the crumpled blue copper, but the green patina I was playing with was actually intended for ferrous metals.  It looked okay on the copper, but when I put it on the steel scraps of the original ribs that I cut off months ago, it turned them into a beautiful mottled green and rust combo.  Gorgeous.  So I'm going to do that to her body, and then use a burgundy patina for her hair.  The chrome was a cool idea, I like shiny things, but I absolutely loved the earth tones of the patinas and I think it's going to be far more beautiful like that.

I also decided that instead of pausing when I reach the elbow of the next arm and making the face before finishing the arm/hand as I had planned, I'm going to finish the whole arm before I move on to the face.  This arm is angled considerably lower with a sharp bend in the elbow leaving the back of the hand near the face.  I initially thought it would be good to have the face in place before I placed the hand, but now it seems like it would probably be better to get in and finish the inside of the forearm and the back of the hand without the face getting in the way.  I may just be trying to postpone the inevitable, but having completed the first hand, I know I'm going to need that extra room when I start working on the second hand.  *And* I get a few more weeks reprieve before I have to start working on the face.

So that's where I'm at.  I've been doing a little Burning Man prep this week, but I finally started bending wire tonight for the other arm.  Hopefully I can finish it before I head out to the desert.

I listened to a lot of Smashing Pumpkins while I was working last week.  I used to be a huge fan in the early 90s.  They kinda lost me after Mellon Collie though, and I reached a point where I couldn't stand any of Billy Corgan's projects from the mid 90s on.  The Pumpkins (BC is the only original member left in the band) just released a new album though, and a friend convinced me to give it a listen.  Turns out, it's probably the best thing they've put out since Mellon Collie.  This album definitely hearkens back to the good ol' days.  Over the weekend I got sucked back into Gish and Siamese Dream, two of my favorite albums of the 90s, and remembered why I loved them so.  The first song of theirs I heard was Rhinoceros, soon after I moved to Los Angeles back in the summer of '91.  There was a weird local UHF music video channel here at the time that my roommates and I used to watch, and one afternoon they played this video.  I had never heard anything like it.  That voice, the dreamy guitar, the heaviness when it finally kicks in, and the psychedelic imagery... it was love at first listen.