Well, so much for posting pictures as elements of the face came together.  I was making such good progress, and liking said progress so much, that I didn't want to stop and I've now finished the face!  I also hit a big milestone last week: the one year mark for working on this piece.  Looking back, it's hard to believe it's been a whole year.  On the other hand, it feels like forever and I can't believe I'm still working on it.  I am still incredibly happy with it though, so it's been worth every second.

When I started this piece, I knew it was going to be my biggest challenge as a sculptor yet, but I felt pretty good about the whole thing.  Except for the face.  I was completely intimidated by that one section, far more than the rest of the piece.  Sure there are details like fingers and toes throughout the body, but for the most part, it's a lot of smooth surfaces with slight shifts here and there for muscles.  That really frees up the reins for the design aspect of the wirework.  The face, however, has a lot of detail in it.  I wasn't sure if the idea I had for translating it to wire was going to work.  My stomach has been twisting and turning for the last twelve months, thinking about how I was going to do this.  And that's not even counting the years I spent planning this piece.  But after all that time spent worrying about it, it actually wasn't that bad.  I mean, it was actually pretty easy.  Well, that may be an exaggeration.  Maybe not easy, but it was a lot easier than I expected.

Using the mannequin head was a tremendous help at times and a bit of a hinderance at others, but when all is said and done, I'm really glad I used it for this part of the sculpture.  There are so many complex curves working their way through all the facial features that I'm not sure I could have done this freehand.

I decided I needed to start with something fairly central and work my way out from there.  The nose wouldn't work as a starting point because of the design (the tip and bridge of the nose are only connected to the rest of the face at one point, the forehead), so I started with the lips and chin.  I was able to move through them pretty quickly, mostly because they're soft, gentle curves.  I added a few lines in the lips to give them shape and hint at the natural lines that are there.  It looked really good.  I actually even cut two of the lines back off because I didn't need them.  I then made the little divot above the lip (I looked it up, that's called the philtrum) and the two nostrils.

With this groundwork set, I began to move outward from there, and on to the sides of the nose.  That slowed down my progress.  A lot of hard curves twisting about.  I used the thickest of the three thinner wires the first time and after struggling for a full night, I got the shape, but the wire was too thick and made the line, which should have been delicate, look a little too strong.  I tried it with the thinnest wire next and it was considerably easier to bend.  However, I've learned that heating this sprung steel wire before I use it makes it easier to bend when it cools off, but it becomes really brittle.  As I was twisting my way through all the curves around the nose, I kept breaking the wire.  I spent a few nights playing with that, to no avail.  Finally I used the medium thickness wire and wrestled with that for a few days.  It finally worked.  Those nose lines then work their way up into the eyebrows.

I decided from this point on to do one side of the face at a time, rather than matching lines, side to side, as I moved through it.  Bending the wire into the eye sockets was a little challenging, though not as bad as the nose.  When the wires meet at the outside of the eye, they erupt into swirls spreading across the temples towards the ears.  There were a lot of swirls, so that took some time, but it looks gorgeous.  I used the medium thickness wire for most of these, but made some of the swirls with the thinnest wire.

I added the tip and bridge of the nose next.  That gave the nose some profile shape.  I started with a tear drop shape at the tip, which turns into a single line running up the bridge.  It continues on to the forehead, a fairly smooth surface with a simple but pretty design, ending in a small heart centered on her forehead.  I also put a small dimple into the chin to give it some definition and profile shape, as well as fill in the open area that was left when I put in the initial chin lines.  The eyes were still just the sockets, so I added the closed eyelids.  Eventually, when the welding is all done, I'll be adding eyelashes with jewelry wire.  Finally, I added a few more swirls to the forehead, and with that, the face was finished!

The were a few unexpected hiccups along the way.  I broke more than a few welds and had to redo them.  This wire is so thin that I can't really hold the welder to it for too long or it burns through the wire, even on the welder's lowest setting, so the welds don't really bite that deep into the metal.  Then I grind the welds down so much that there's actually very little filler holding the wires together.  When I put stress on the welds by grinding another area, or trying to bend wire that's already attached, the welds break.  I tried to leave a little extra filler on them when I re-welded them, but I couldn't leave too much or it started looking chunky.  I also had to extend the face a little bit, as the mannequin head is close to human sized, but just a little too small.  I ended up shaving her bottom lip off the mannequin head to be able to extend the face a touch.  Between the weld burns and the shaved lip, this poor mannequin head has taken quite a beating.

So with the face done, there's not much left to do on the head.  I still need to work on her hairline and add ears.  That'll be interesting.  When that's done, I can make the neck and attach the head to the rest of the piece, and then all I have to do is add the hair.  I'm a little nervous about that, but not as nervous as I was starting the face.  At that point the sculpting is done and all I have to do is finish it off with the patina and cover the base in patinated copper.  I feel like I'm almost done, but I realize I do still have a fair amount of work left.

Fall Art Walk at The Brewery is coming up this weekend.  I had to take a break from the face for a couple days last week to change out about 2500 Christmas lights from the dragon and one of the seahorses.  I'm actually still working on that.  I have to clean up and organize my space too, so it looks like I'm done with the piece for the next week.  Once art walk is over though, I'm going to finish this thing!  My guess now is that I'll be done around Christmas.

As I've been working on the face independently from the body, I took the support pipe off the sculpture's base and have let her stand free for the last few weeks.  What a difference it makes looking at her without that thick pipe running up to her back.  She looks so light and free and... natural!  I'm so happy with how this is turning out.  If I can keep it up through these last few months, this is going to be a really beautiful piece.

I did skip out for a few nights over the last few weeks to see a few concerts.  The Black Keys with Tegan & Sara and Peter Gabriel.  All amazing shows.  I've been listening to a lot more Black Keys since the show.  This is a favorite.  Another that sounds great loud in my loft.

Well, I made it back from the desert in one piece.  Turned out to be a big year for me out there this year.  Not only did I decide to bring two fairly large projects out to the playa next year, I also got engaged!  It's going to be a busy year.  I've got a playa wedding to plan, an art car to assemble and my first static installation for Burning Man to build, which will also be my first big project with my fiancée.  I've already started making lists.  Long lists.  I have a lot to accomplish in the next eleven months, but first I need to finish the lady.

Got back a few weeks ago and as usual, I had a lot of cleaning and laundry to do once I landed in LA, but I got back to work pretty quickly.  I immediately shortened the fingers on the second hand.  As expected, it was pretty easy and only took me a few days.  I'm much happier with it now.

Next up was to start the head.  So far, I've been doing everything entirely free hand.  For the face, I decided to draw the design on a mannequin head I picked up a few months ago and try to bend the wire around it.  Drawing is one of my least favorite parts of this whole process though.  I draw like a 2nd grader with a crayon tucked into my chubby little fist.  Drawing three dimensionally on a mannequin head?  Well, I wasn't looking forward to it, but fortunately, once I got started, it actually went really well.  I found some nice lines within the natural lines of the face, and augmented it with some really pretty swirls coming out of her eyes and lining her hairline.  The lines I drew are far from perfect, but at least I have an idea of what the lines will look like now.  It took me three or four days to work it out, but I finally started bending wire a few nights ago.  I'm using the smaller wires again, but this time I preheated the wire and it's actually really easy to bend now.  I'm welding some pretty small curls though, and it's pretty tricky, putting some of these pieces together.  It's slow going, but I'm pretty confident it's going to look great.

So, it looks like I'm going to be working on this for the next few weeks or so.  I'll try to post some pics as elements of the face come together.

I've been wanting to post this song for a while, but I haven't found it on youtube yet.  Just found it on soundcloud, so hopefully this link will work.  It's called "Cut Me, Focus" and it's from Cookie Duster, a side project of Brenden Canning of Broken Social Scene.  Doesn't sound anything like BSS, but I love it.  It sounds amazing in my loft, really loud.  =)

Well, I've finished the second hand.  All that's left now is the face, the hair and the patina to finish it.  I meant to write when I finished the arm but things have been pretty crazy with Burning Man coming up.  The forearm was trickier than I thought it would be, mostly because of the twist in the arm, and trying to match the design and size of the first arm, given that twist.  It ended up looking pretty good though, and it's at a nice angle, with this elbow dropped considerably lower than the first, and the forearm canted slightly forward.  The difference in the position of the two arms gives it a very natural and realistic movement that ties in well with the positioning of the legs.

I started the second hand next.  I had already made the fingernails and bent the outlines of these knuckles when I did the first hand, so I had a pretty good jump on it, but I still needed to make the wrinkles of the knuckles and then attach each of the finger segments.  Since the first hand was bent forward and the second hand is bent back, that meant the wires leading to the first knuckles of this hand didn't flow out of the arm like the other, due to the wrinkles created by the bent wrist.  I attached those first knuckles and moved on to the palm.  I found myself once again working with the stiff thinner wire and it fought me the entire way, right down to the last weld.  I didn't use my friends suggestion that I mentioned a few posts ago, of trying to heat it up first, because I'm not sure of what the side effects of doing that are just yet and I wanted to make sure the hands matched.  I will use that trick when I move on to the face though.  When the main lines of the palm were finished, I started building up the meat of the fingers and attaching them, starting with the pinkie.

These fingers are also in a different position than those of the first hand, so it was fun getting them into the right shapes.  As I had hoped, the positions of the fingers add a graceful elegance to her pose.  Admittedly, the hands aren't as dainty as I had hoped them to be, but she's not really a dainty girl to begin with, so they fit her body fine.  Alas, when all was said and done though, I realized that the fingers on this hand are a touch too long.  But I saw that coming.  It all started with the pinkie.  I wanted to make it curl in and touch the palm, and in doing so, I extended the length between the first and second knuckles a little too far, and as I worked my way down the hand, that length got a little longer, finger by finger.  By the time I got to the fourth finger, it was getting a little out of control, so I actually already shortened a few of them, but I need to shorten all four fingers one more time to make myself okay with it or I will see it every time I look at the piece.  No biggie though, could be worse.  It'll maybe add one day of work.  It's just the one segment of each finger, so I can cut along the welds (three per finger), shorten the wires, reattach and grind.  Easy enough.  But for all intents and purposes, they are done and it looks great.

So now, as far as sculpting, all that's left is the head and hair, but I'm taking a break before I dive into that.  I leave for Burning Man in one week.  It's time to pack and I'm super excited.  I've been working on this piece, daily, for over ten months now.  By far, the longest I've worked on any piece.   Calander-wise anyway.  As far as straight hours, I'm probably pretty close to the same as the dragon, but I packed that into 5 1/2 months, working 80 hour weeks the entire project.  This has been ten long months of working on the same piece, day in and day out, and to be honest, I'm getting pretty burnt out.  Granted, the majority of the piece is done now, but with the amount of design and detail in what I have left, it's easily going to be the most challenging bit of sculpting I've ever done.  Bad time to lose my juju.  But now I get to take a break, go out to the desert, recharge, get inspired, get motivated, then come back here and finish this piece.  The timing couldn't be better.

Burning Man changed my life in 2001.  It started me on my path as a sculptor, and has been a huge part of my life ever since.  It's my new years, birthday, and Christmas all rolled into one.  It's how I mark time.  When I look back at any of the last eleven years, I see them measured between burns rather than being bookended by new years eve parties.  It's when I reflect on what I've done in the past solar cycle, and what I want to accomplish in the next.  Friendships, relationships, projects, life events... all tie into burns, or fall in between them.  I sat at the base of a massive sculpture called Bliss Dance one night two burns ago, marveling up at her, and decided it was finally time to do my nude.  It had been smoldering in the back of my mind for over four years at that point, but until then, I wasn't ready to tackle it.  But as I sat there that night, I realized that the time had come.  I came back to Los Angeles completely inspired.  Over the next few months, I thought a lot about the pose as I finished up a few other small projects, and finally took my first few steps towards starting the project.  I had one fairly large setback though, right out of the gate, and ended up taking a step back.  False start, and I lost my momentum.  Before I knew it, it was time to head back out to the desert.  At last years burn, I was really disappointed that the year had passed and I hadn't bent a single piece of wire for this piece yet.  I reflected on the failure and fears that made me take that step back and then let those fears be carried off with the playa dust.  And, as always happens out on the playa, I got inspired.  Really inspired.  Fired up.  I came home and had one month til Art Walk.  I took that time to prep for art walk, but also to find and hire a model and photographer, shoot the model, start the design and start figuring out the base.  When art walk ended, it took me one week to start bending wire.  Now the year has passed, I'm heading out to the desert again, the piece is almost finished, and it looks even more beautiful than I had hoped.  It's been a struggle, no doubt, but I am thrilled with the way it's turned out.  What a journey the year has been.  I'm so excited.

So now as I leave you for a few weeks, and I leave my metal lady here, waiting for my return, here's one more picture.  This is what she looks like tonight.

I've been hearing word from friends who are already on the playa that it's incredibly dusty this year, one of the worst in memory, with heavy windstorms.  So I leave you with this...

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.

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...