I finally have something to blog about. After days of rain and cold wind, I made a little more progress on this project. I had been waiting for a nice day to get outside and sand the projects. That took a while. It was finally at a point that I was asking myself, "Just when was the last time I saw the sun?" On the few sunny days, high, very cold winds coming from the north made it so unpleasant that I just did not want to be outside. During this rainy period, I started working on another project. I will be blogging about that in a couple of weeks. For now I will just say that the project has been somewhat tedious and repetitive at this stage. It took a long while to get it going to a point that I have some pictures worth showing. However, once it was underway, I was reluctant to drop it until I came to a worthwhile stopping point. So during the long, gray days, I kept busy with something at least.
But finally, the sun came out and I sanded my (hand cast and completely hollow) pâpier maché skulls. These skulls will be the base from my shrunken head project. So yea! One more step forward. Then life became very busy for a few weeks. This week I finally was able to step back into the studio.
Yesterday I painted the skulls with two coats of Gesso. The Gesso helps seal the skulls and also covers up the newsprint, leaving a plain surface. At the moment they are bright white, but at least they are now ready for painting and embellishments to make them look like shrunken heads.
I plan to use different techniques on each skull. I have a number of materials that I want to experiment with, and I plan to use them to see how they work. The shrunken heads, which are part of a larger project, need to look gruesome rather than being multiples of the same thing.
The larger project is a life-sized figure that will be holding the heads on chains of some sort. The figure is complete, but it has not been dressed in its final costume. I need to get the costume on before the wig is in place. So after a few touches here and there, the figure will be ready for display. Given the small amount of time I have to work on things, I hope to have the project in another month or two. I need to get as much finished as I can before my travel season starts.
Anyway, that is where the project is at the moment. I went from a period where I was in a creative slump with no ideas to having so many ideas that I cannot get to them all. I am working on three different projects now and I will be blogging about the other projects shortly.
Check back for the next update in about a week to ten days.
