Well, it's been four weeks since I applied the patina.  Turns out this part, being patient, has been the toughest part of the whole process.  The color hasn't changed much since I applied it.  It did get a little lighter and there has been some slight discoloration in a few areas, but really, if you weren't obsessively combing over every inch of it, every day, you wouldn't have noticed.  Impatience finally got the best of me about a week ago.  I decided to start working it over with a tooth brush.  I brushed off quite a bit of excess patina, all of it coming off in little green clouds, but for as much as I was removing the excess, I was also rubbing the powder into the metal.  I've done it three times now, and there are some small areas of raw metal showing throughout the piece, but there really hasn't been much rust happening.  It rained a few nights this week, so I moved it next to the door both nights in hopes that the moisture in the air might give it a little push.  It does look a lot better than it did a month ago, but it's still really green.

I also decided it was finally time to apply the blue patina to the copper foiled base.  As expected, it created a beautiful mix of varying shades of blue, which definitely softened the green of the sculpture.  Without that sharp contrast against the shiny copper, the green looks a little more… natural?  However, one problem has popped up.  The copper coated nails, which I was hoping would just blend in with the copper foil, are actually leaving rusty greenish brown spots in the blue patina.  The copper coating must not have survived, or maybe it was too thin.  Either way, the steel under the copper coating is reacting to the patina and leaving rust spots.  Didn't see that coming.  If it were more organic looking, I *might* be able to roll with it, but it's not.  It's following a few different patterns of nails.  This will not do.  My girlfriend suggested cleaning the affected areas off, putting a dab of rustoleum over the nail heads and trying to reapply the patina to those areas.  I tried it on one nail in the back last night and reapplied the patina tonight and it seems to have worked.  I cleaned off the other nails tonight and will give it a shot with the rest of them this week.  Hopefully that'll solve the problem.

Funny.  The part I want to rust isn't rusting, and the part I didn't expect or want to rust, is rusting.  Well, I'll keep you posted.

I've spent the better part of the last month listening to three albums: The debut releases from Alt-J and Django Django, and the solo disc from Jim James of My Morning Jacket.  I wasn't a fan of MMJ when I first heard them about 6 or 7 years ago, but I'm going to have to give them another shot… when I can finally stop listening to his solo disc.  Beautiful and haunting, this is the first song I heard from it and I was immediately enamored.

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.

I had intended to make this post before Thanksgiving, but it was a crazy week and I was pretty short on time, so I'm a little behind here.  I just got back in town after a great ten day visit with my family.

I hit a big milestone before I left town though.  I finished the neck, meaning I've finally finished the entire body.  All that's left to actually sculpt is her hair.  So close now.

I already knew the position I wanted her head in, tilted to her left and back just a bit, so figuring out the length of the neck was probably the trickiest part.  I started by attaching two wires to the top of her spine.  I found the right length and angle, got a nice "back of the neck" curve, then held the head in place with a few spring clips while I welded the wires coming from her spine to the back hairline.  I started working on her right side first, which is the stretched, straighter side of her neck.  It was pretty easy going and when I finished it, it looked great.  Then I moved to the other side, but after struggling for an hour or so, I realized her neck was going to be about 3 inches thick.  I had attached one of the first wires on the other side in the wrong spot and her entire neck was off center.  The head was still in the right place, but the neck was completely off.  Fortunately, I didn't have to cut the whole thing off and start over, though I did have to cut almost every wire, bend it a little further to the side and reattach it at another point.  It was a fairly easy fix though, and this time, it really did look great.  The other side of the neck is sort of scrunched up, so it has a lot of wrinkles.  It was a little trickier than the first side, but it worked itself out.  I got to bend a few nice complex curves to accomplish the wrinkles.  I filled out the front of the neck last, and that was all she wrote.

There were a few bumps along the way.  I burnt through a few wires.  I wish I would have kept track of how many times I've done that on this piece.  You'd think I'd learn, but I always push it just a second too long.  Then I say bad words.  Then I fix it.

So anyway, I finished the neck.  She looks amazing.  I am so beyond happy. 

I picked up a new patina color, vista burgundy, but it ended up looking pretty chocolaty.  The original vista rust, now that it's been working the steel for about a month, is starting to look good.  I may still try the red, just to see how it looks, but so far I think I like the rust best.

I also started doing a little work on the base.  I can't get too far ahead of myself on the base, because I can't really do too much to it until I've finished the patina and clear coat on the rest of the piece, but I got a little jump on it.  I was originally going to try to cover it with a sheet of wrinkled copper foil.  After further consideration though, I realized that I'd need to cut into it in two spots to get it around the feet, and that would leave two seams across the top.  It also wouldn't really work for bending it around the sides, as the base is an odd shape.  Instead, I've decided to cover it with overlapping strips of the wrinkled copper foil.  That way the seams will look/be intentional and a little more uniform throughout the base.  Also, I decided to put one long strip around the sides, rather than trying to fold it over from the top.  I measured the circumference of the base (a little under 15 feet) and bought an additional 15 feet of the foil to supplement the original 10 or 15 feet I bought.  The base is only 3.75 inches tall, so I rolled out the entire length of foil and cut it in half lengthwise.  It's 1 foot wide, so that gave me two strips of foil at 6 inches by 15 feet,  I rolled one strip back up and began wrinkling the other.  

When I finished wrinkling the whole length, I laid the first eight feet along the edge of a sheet of plywood and bent a nice straight line along one edge, sliding it down and continuing the line until I finished all fifteen feet. I then marked a line on the plywood at 3.75 inches, lined the folded edge up against the line and repeated the process, folding the other side.  Now I have a fifteen foot long strip of the wrinkled foil with clean folded edges at the 3.75 inch height of the base.  Starting in the back V of the base, I wrapped it all the way around it, finishing at the other side of the V.  As I said, I can't attach it until I've applied the patina and clear coat to the sculpture itself, but at least I got a jump on it and I now have a good idea of what it's going to look like.  I love it!

So next up is the hair.  Still not 100% sure how that's going to play out.  I have an idea of what I want, but I think I need to look at some images online to get an idea of how I want the hair to fall.  Definitely going to be long and wavy.  My model had shoulder length hair and I asked her to tie it up anyway, so I could get clear shots of her neck and shoulders, so this is one aspect of the piece that I have no reference photos of.  I'll be using all thinner wire for this part.  I need to figure out a better way to heat this stuff up.  It's taking me forever to get them hot with the little propane torch I have and I need to do it to about 50 more pieces.  Oy.  So hair.  That's what I'll be focusing on through December.  Wish me luck!

Winter is my least favorite time of year, even in a temperate climate like Los Angeles.  When daylight savings ends, it gets dark before I leave my day job.  "The darkness" also brings with it cooler days, cold nights and rain.  But not even good rain.  Usually just enough to be uncomfortable and a nuisance.  Only rarely do we get a good heavy soaking in LA, and it's even more rare that we get any thunder and lightning with it.  Summer rains are almost non-existent.  Being part lizard and loving the warm summer nights, this cold, gloomy time of year is always a bit of a downer for me.  But on the flip side, it always brings a beautiful musical shift to my evenings, with lots of bowed strings and more melancholy music. I got off the plane last night and it had apparently been raining all day.  The rain had stopped, but everything was wet and just chilly enough to need a light coat.  When I got home and unpacked, this song bubbled up, perfectly fitting my emotional state.  I have no idea what he's singing about, but the textures, dynamics and tones speak volumes to my heart.  It was a perfect song to listen to while standing back and assessing my metal lady after nearly two weeks of being away.

Getting closer and closer every day. 

I finished relighting the dragon, the jellyfish and a seahorse just in time to clean up my loft and squeeze in a few hours of sleep before I opened my doors for our fall art walk.  Ever since our spring art walk, I had really been hoping to have this piece done in time for this one, as it's sort of the one year mark that I've been working on this piece, but alas, as close as I am, I'm not that close.  Had a great weekend anyway though, and as soon as it ended I got back to work on the face.  First I gave her a hairline, closing off her forehead, and added a few more swirls.  Ears were next.  My first attempt used one line that swirled its way through the entire ear.  I made one and wasn't that excited by it, so I scrapped it and tried again, this time with a design using a few lines.  Laid in the first line and an accent line, and loved it.

The second line that finishes the ear actually works its way into the ear from the jawline.  This time the design was dead on and the ears look great. 

Instead of creating a wire scalp for her and building her hair off that, her hair is going to start off her hairline and then continue building off itself.  I still needed to figure out the shape of the rest of her head though so I found a few images of bald female profiles to help with that shape.  I temped in a wire starting at her slight widows peak, working its way over her head and down her neck. Once  I locked the shape in, I added the hairline at the back of her head.  Then I continued working on her jaw and chin. 

 

I've pretty much finished the head now, and am ready to start on her neck.  The first few lines I lay in will be starting at her spine.  I'm not expecting this to be too hard once I get started, but these first few lines are going to be tricky.  They'll be the lines that define the angle and position of her head, and it's a pretty important aspect of the sculpture.  The way she holds her head will determine the emotion of the piece.  I've been holding the head up and moving it around trying to find the right position for the last few days.  I had been envisioning her head tilted and turned to her left with her chin slightly down.  Tonight I decided to keep it tilted and turned to the left, but to also let it roll back a bit instead.  It definitely gives a more sultry, and more importantly, a more languid feel to her pose.  This exposes more of the underside of her chin though, and I realized that needed a little more work.  I ended up cutting a few welds on the chin and reworking the wires.  I'll finish that up tomorrow and hopefully by the end of the night, her head will be attached to the body.

I also spent some time this past weekend playing with patinas again.  I picked up more of the green that I'll be using for her body to do some more tests.  It's looking good.  I had been thinking of a burgundy patina for her hair, but was swayed at the last minute and ended up picking up a rust patina instead.  It's still working the metal, but so far, I don't really like this color for the hair.  I think I'll probably end up picking up some burgundy and see how that looks in comparison.  I also started putting a little focus on the base.  I wrinkled up some strips of the copper foil and laid them out around her feet.  My current plan is to use that blueish green patina I tested a few months back, but after seeing the large strips of the copper on the base, I'm considering not using a patina on it at all.  The wrinkled copper looked so beautiful in the light.  It looked like she was walking on the surface of the sun.  I'm not committing to either idea just yet, as I really do love the blue green as well.  Probably won't decide on that until the rest of the sculpture has been finished with the patinas.

So that's where I'm at.  The rest of this week is going to be all about attaching the head and building up the neck.

This has been a pretty excellent year in music.  There have been a lot of great new releases by Grizzly Bear, Tame Impala, Solid Gold, Kaki King, Alberta Cross, The Album Leaf, The Raveonettes, Polica, Chromatics, Sinead O'connor, Cookie Duster, Silversun Pickups, Miike Snow, Patrick Watson, and even an amazing new release from The Smashing Pumpkins, who I gave up on in the late 90s.  I think my favorite album of the year though, is the third release from an awesome little Canadian band called The Luyas.  I love their first two albums and I had high hopes for the new disc, but I wasn't really expecting to love it as much as I do. Needless to say, I've been listening to them a lot these last few weeks as I've been working on the face.  This track isn't from the new album, but it's one of my favorite tracks from their last album.  So quirky and beautiful.

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.  =)