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.