Anthropomorphic Figure for Halloween Part 8

Today I have photos of the torso.  I guess these photos illustrate what I mean about embellishing the doll.  I had previously blogged that when I made an art doll that I tried to give it at least three layers of embellishment.

First I make the basic vision of my doll with whatever embellishments I imagined.  In this case I just envisioned a basic orange pumpkin shaped figure with some sort of decorations on the legs.  I had originally thought that some basic drawn on leaf shapes on the limbs would be enough.  The leaves are just basic heart shapes, rather that trying to draw actual pumpkin leaves.  (Artistic license.)  That seemed sort of plain once I had the pieces made.

My next round of embellishment added shading to the pumpkin to make it look more like an actual
pumpkin.  I painted and added veining to the leaves.  I also added gold paint to the legs just so that they would not look exactly like the arms.  The figure still seemed a little plain.  After all, if I am going to make a figure of an imaginary being, I might as well make it over the top.   I felt that it still needed something more.

I went for a third round of embellishment.  Next I added stars to the torso.  It still seemed to need something more so I added moons to the torso as well.  The position of the moon or star was changed with each addition so that not all the embellishments were facing the same direction.  During my last addition I decided that the contrast on the legs just was not where I needed it to be.  To correct this I gave the background of the legs a wash and wipe off of antique copper.  This helped somewhat.

The head has not been done yet.  As I blogged last week, I was experimenting with clay formulas to see if they would be suitable for the head.  I was still waiting for the clay around the head armature to dry.  I will have more on the head of the project on the next blog post.