Well, this will probably be my last post for another month or so.  The patina has been applied to the sculpture, the base has been wrapped in copper, and now it's time for patience to come into play. 

I used two different colored patinas so far: red and green.  I painted the green on the body, but the hair is way too dense to really get a brush or sponge in deep enough to give it a good coat, so the red needed to be sprayed on.  Since the clear coat will eventually be sprayed on as well, I built a makeshift spray booth for this part of the process.  It's basically just a huge cube made of steel pipe and speed rail fittings that I had laying around, with thin plastic drop cloths for walls. 

The hair was first, so I wrapped the entire body, except for the hair, with more drop cloths, being especially careful around the hairline.  I had to be be sure the red wouldn't bleed over onto the face, the ears or anything else.  I wrapped any little curls that I could, tucked the plastic through open spaces that were too small to wrap and even slipped some small sheets of the plastic inside the face to protect that surface as well.

The red went on really easily.  It's shockingly red when you first put it on, but within a week, it starts to mellow and a nice, darker, richer red starts to come out.

I knew painting the green on the body was going to take some time, so I waited til Friday night to start.  It ended up taking me about eight hours on Friday night and an additional four hours on Saturday night.  I used sponge paint brushes (like you'd use to paint a wall) to get most of the outer surface, then had to use little portrait style paint brushes to get the insides and hard to reach areas.  It was tedious work, but I eventually covered the entire surface area of the piece.  And boy, is it green.  I've done tests and I know it always starts this way before the green lightens up and the rust starts, but having worked on this piece for as long as I have, to see her look so very, very green is a little alarming.  So, as I said, this is where the patience comes in.

The last bit that I was able to do for now was to cover the base with the wrinkled copper foil.  This will eventually get covered in a blue patina, but I need to wait to apply that until I see if I need to rework the patina on the body.  If I need to brush off some of the green, or reapply more, I don't want it to ruin the blue on the base.  Putting the copper on the base was kind of like putting a puzzle together.  The foil isn't wide enough to cover the base in one piece, and even if it was, the feet would be in the way, so I ended up overlapping seven different shaped pieces on the top, nailing them in with small copper nails, and finished it with the long strip around the outer edge that I made a few months ago.  The trickiest parts were cutting a nice tight fit around the toes, and not hitting the nails already holding the base together or the steel box tube inside with these new copper nails.  It took me two nights to complete, but it looks really good.  Can't wait to see it with the patina on it.

So now I wait.  I will, of course, keep you posted when things start to move forward again.  Until then...

I stumbled across this beautiful song mixed into a really gorgeous Burning Man time lapse video and immediately fell in love with it.  Don't know much about the group at all, and I'm pretty sure this isn't an official video, but it's weird and fits the music really well.

Wow.  My last post was December 2nd.  Two months ago.  Well, I had decided I wasn't going to post again until the hair was done.  It took about twice as long as I expected it to (surprise surprise), but to be fair, that two months included my birthday, Christmas, New Years, my gf's birthday and our anniversary.  Two months is still two months though.  But... I've finally finished the hair, which means the sculpting phase of this project is finally finished!

Not really sure what to say about the hair.  It's long and wavy, so I got to bend a lot of really fun curves.  Like every other aspect of this sculpture, it was incredibly challenging.  I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do going into it.  Some things worked and others didn't.  I did things, cut them off and redid them.  I burnt through a bunch of wires and deserved to have my mouth washed out with soap every time.

Since I didn't give her a scalp, all her hair comes directly off her hairline.  I started at the back of the neck and started working my way up to her ears.  I didn't try to make each wire represent a single hair.  Instead, I used a few wires at a time to swirl around themselves, creating thick curls flowing down her back.  I let a pretty twist of hair drip down from her temples in front of each ear.  The rest of the hair in front swoops over/around her head, except for a few strands on her right side that spill over her shoulder and down onto her breast.  That turned out to be a really nice touch.  The hair does a beautiful job of shaping her head.   Grinding got to be tricky towards the end, but I managed to get my dremel in each time.  It was fun watching the open areas fill in, every wire bringing me one step closer to being done.  It was especially exciting, if not a little jarring, when I reached the point where I could tell exactly how many wires I had left to attach.  It's been almost sixteen months since I started this, and it feels great being this close to finished.

Once the hair was done, I noticed that two welds had broken in the face.  I assume it was from all the vibration while I was grinding down the welds in her hair.  I freaked out when I saw it because now that the whole head is closed in, I thought there'd be no way for me to get in to weld and grind inside the face.  Fortunately, I was able to fit the welder into an opening in the cheek and and the dremel through her eyelid, and fix up both welds pretty cleanly. 

I went over the whole piece and found some spots that needed a little more grinding to smooth them out, and when I was done, I used an air compressor to blow off the metal dust that's been collecting in all the crevices over the last sixteen months.  Next I sprayed it with vinegar and cleaned off a thin layer of rust that had started to form in some areas.  

I also added small rubber feet under the base.  It was sitting flush with the floor and I was worried that once I added the copper and patina to the base it might chip off when I moved it around or tried to tip it to pick it up.  It's now hovering about a half inch over the floor, and not only will it be safer now, it also looks really cool like that.

So patinas are next.  I'm going to do the hair first.  I'll report back shortly.

Been listening to a lot of new music these last few months.  Went to a couple great shows and made a mix tape for my girl.  This song kept coming back to me though.  This is the first single from Foals' upcoming cd, Holy Fire.  So good.  I've been cranking this one pretty loud.