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.