Sketchy times ahead

here are some sketches and thumbnails for the new series I'm working on.. 

also, something is weird with my scanner, so please excuse the quality...

 Working out an idea...still not sure which to do..

 I have a box of lovely weathered twigs that my mother collected in Mendocino from pruning our apple trees. They smell so good, like fog and sleepy and cold water and iron. There will be lots of sticks and stones in this series.

 A little compilation of a few ideas - some of these will be paintings, some freestanding sculptures, and some wall-mounted pieces.

I have recently discovered Maned Wolves, which are super weird, tall, ancient wolf-like creatures. They are a very unique South American animal, that is not really a wolf, fox, or coyote, but a whole other genus of canids that probably evolved directly from carnivores native to South America in the Pleistocene era. So, I drew some. And probably will sculpt them, which will be fun. I might change their coloring a little, though, so it doesn't just look like I screwed up and made an awkwardly tall red fox.

And now, back to the drawing table. 

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Vampira!

So here is Vampira, aka Maila Nurmi, all finished! I am pretty happy with her, although taking the photos I realized how disproportionately large her head is to her body, but oh well. This was a really fun sculpture, if anyone has a commission idea like this, I would love to do more!

 I had to do one black and white...since..that's how she was.

 her sleeves are magically blowing in the wind, permanently...

(above - left = after curling, right = before)

Her hair was a special project - the hair I used was straight, black Suri Alpaca hair, so I actually hand-curled her hair a little, since she has that '50s wave goin' on. I used a little alcohol lamp to heat one of my metal sculpting tools, and then curled sections of her hair. It was much trickier than doing the same with a curling iron on a life sized head of hair, so the waves arent perfect, but much more "Vampira"-esque than the previously completely straight hair. But using natural hair fiber is fun, since you can hairspray it and style it just like your own hair (except that it came off of a medium sized camelid)

 also, a special thanks to Mr. Azma for the request to make this, it was a very fun project, thank you!

completely unrelated, but here is a new bigger bust I am working on for Casey Love's class at Korpus School of Art. So fun! Wrinkle town. This is just after the first session, its still super rough...this will progress over the next 8 weeks, hopefully it will turn out well!

 

the end!

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Vampira Progress

Here's some shots of my commisioned Vampira piece, which should be getting hair and a costume today!

 The face, mid-sculpting.

The skull she's holding, also mid-sculpt.

Moody lighting and a paint job.

Eyes still need some work..quite wonky. She'll also have hair, soon, which might help.

The skull was pretty fun, its a little more than an inch across.

more soon!

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