Wrapping up the week

We seem to be finally done with the summer heat wave, and now we've been getting cooler weather and rain. That means incredible thunderheads in the evening, like this view I shot from my bedroom porch. Whenever I get around to taking my landscape oil painting classes, I want to paint skies like this!

I've been picking on Clarity, though not too much this week. Still going back and forth on the legs. I like the right front leg, but the other three are still giving me fits in hoof sizing and positioning, leg length and overall proportions. This shot shows some of the muscle detailing I've started to define on the right side, too. (When I get frustrated with the legs I work on the body instead!)

I'm about to go on vacation for a week (camping near Telluride, Colorado), and I was hoping to get these two "Boreas" china glazings finished before I go. Not to be, though. I got pretty far along but now I'm down to the details like eyes and hooves and they can't be rushed; that sort of thing still takes quite a few firings.

I am so very familiar with "Boreas" after all these years, but I still do a little double-take each time I pick up one of the smaller "Halfling Boreas's". It was created by using the stereolithography and rapid prototyping process—where your sculpture is scanned into a CAD file, then a smaller-scale 3-D prototype can be created. In "Halfling's" case, the file was accidentally reversed—resulting in a perfect mirror image of the sculpture! I decided to go ahead and send him for china casting anyway, for a unique difference! There were only 24 of those cast, so it was nice to glaze another one of those for a change.

Back to work on the 24th, hopefully re-energized from a week of play!

Oh by the way, I was looking at the settings for this blog and I noticed that I had the comments set to where only those with Google accounts could post a comment. I have re-set that to "anyone", and you can also post anonymously. So feel free to post your suggestions and comments! I welcome your input on everything. I have put it on moderation, where I get to review each comment first, just to see how it goes initially. I won't delete thoughtful and constructive criticism/feedback, but I do insist that this be a rudeness-free space.

My camera isn't being helpful

Another photo of Clarity. I mostly worked on 3 of the 4 legs today. (You can tell which one I didn't work on, it's still all blobby!) Hmmm, this photo makes the cannon bones in the 2 back legs look too long. But when I look at the sculpture itself, they don't. And now I dislike the shape of the right hind leg and hoof (from this angle at least). Well, phoooey on photography! I'll have to just let it sit for a few days. It's a great help to step away from a sculpture and come back. New things present themselves. By the way, this is going to be a warmblood mare.

The good news for my china glazing customers is that the air compressor will be ready on Wednesday. It's getting a whole new regulator. Somehow I managed to crack the old one resulting in unstoppable leaking of air!

Did you get photos in your Feedburner email?

I just noticed in the feedburner email posting that I received, that the 5 Clarity photos weren't there, nor even any icons or links to them. Did anyone else receiving my blog postings via email not see the photos? I wonder if there is a limit on how many photos Feedburner transmits. Hmmm.

Meet "Clarity"

Well, the new sculpture has a name, "Clarity". I'll write a blog entry on the why of that name, when/if it does get finished. And I'm starting to believe I might actually finish it. What a foreign and giddy feeling after 2 years of false starts and not much believing in myself.





Notes: I haven't worked on the head at all this week and it is too large because no real refining and sculpting has been done. I always do the head last. This is going to be yet another KYG horse sculpture with a turned head that will be hard to photograph. The head is always going to appear too large when shot straight at the face! (Though I have found you can minimize that by shooting the piece in highest resolution the digital camera has, from fairly far away, and cropping the photo in.) I think I have all the legs where I want them (they are still too thick, too). Now the fun part, the part I love: refining and detailing. (Though I hate sculpting hooves!)

Answers to what people are asking me: This sculpture in clay is "traditional" scale, on the smallish side, at 8.5" tall. (For my non-model-horse-community blog readers: roughly 1:9 scale). It is intended for production in bone china. (If the mold-maker and caster don't run away in horror, that is!) It might have to go on a base—which I know most of you don't like, and me included—but I don't want to let that be the only reason it doesn't get made. I am hoping for the best that it will balance just fine as-is.

I don't want to do a resin edition. My china customers have stayed with me all this time and you are the ones I am working for now. That said, I have to make a mold and pour resins in order to have masters for china production, so I might hand-prep a couple of the casts from my own mold and sell those unfinished. If I do, they will only be announced and offered to those reading this blog.

Dog Days

The Denver area just set a new record for number of consecutive days of 90°-plus heat. Blech! (But it's a dry heat, thank goodness!) We don't have air conditioning in our house, and honestly you'd only want it for about 2 months a year so I'm glad we never paid to have it installed and the costs on our energy bill. But this summer sure is testing our endurance. I'm still playing tennis 3 days a week—but really early in the morning—and the boys don't get the evening walk until after 7pm.

My studio is on the ground floor of the house, and 3 of the walls are built into the sloping lot, so it stays cool no matter what the daytime temp in the summer. The boyz have figured this out and they stay down here with me. They've taken over the spare bed we moved down here when Paul started working out of the home. (I used to have a couch and coffee table over there, which was nice back when I had graphic design clients in for meetings.) Because the bed is now the doggie playpen, it looks like this all the time:

I can't keep it made because they wrestle and dig around in the bedding. Oh well. Good thing I'm pretty much the slacker housekeeper anyway.

By the way, I figured out why the new horse sculpture seemed familiar. I think I might be channelling Doris Lindner just a bit:

I own 5 Lindner Royal Worcester pieces, and two of them have a little of the motion and leg positions of my new guy.

Now, I can hear you saying, "I know Doris Lindner and you're no Doris Lindner!!" Absolutely right! I would never presume to compare the quality of my sculpture work to hers. But I think it's kind of cool to imagine that revered equine artists who have passed are out there somewhere looking over the shoulders of living artists who worship them.

Custom Glazing Class is a Go

I got a good response to my idea for a custom glazing seminar next year in Lexington. So I'm definitely going to do it, most likely an all-day class on the Friday of BreyerFest. I'm hoping I can pay to use one of the Holiday Inn's smaller meeting rooms (that are in Breyer's control), so that anyone who wants to watch us glaze can drop in during the day. It's too early to pursue the details of making it happen, but I'll post sign-up information here when I pull it together next year.

Also, my air compressor remains in the shop, so I can't do any glazing work with the airbrush. It's all at a stand-still! But I did make 4 Keeshond tiles, and I'm plugging away at the sculpture. Though I'm feeling a little stuck on it at the moment. I'm having trouble with the whole right side/legs of the sculpture and I don't think I've got the action right. It just doesn't look right. I have a bad feeling that I need to reverse the action of the legs or have the head turning the other way, but I'm not ready to go there yet!

I did finish another Hagen-Renaker "Sheba" custom glaze last week, for a customer in California. It's a warm dappled fleabit grey. I completely re-painted the eyes and think the head is especially pretty:


I want to congratulate Lisa Sents, whose custom glazed Optime won the National Champion CM Glaze China Halter-Light/Gaited at the 2008 NAN show in Kentucky last week:

That's the only result I know of, because they don't show photos of the Top Ten winners. I'd love to hear if any of my other work top tenned at NAN.

Oh drat, it's Friday!

The odd thing about this new clay horse is, that I keep having this itchy feeling that I have seen it before. I hope it is not because it is too similar to someone else's sculpture!! Or maybe it has been lurking in the back of my mind these last 2 years of hopelessly non-starter sculptures and not wanting to sculpt at all? Waiting for the right time? Maybe so, because I am incredibly charged up about this one and I am actually disappointed it's now Friday night and the weekend is here. That means it is now "quality family time" and I won't get back to the studio until Monday. And oooh I don't want to wait that long!

I got some more time on the sculpture this week mainly because my air compressor decided to stop working. (Maybe protesting the heat wave!) So it's in the shop, and I get to do things like sculpt and cast Keeshond tiles instead. Never mind that I have 4 china horses I really wanted to get started now. The last thing I did before the compressor failed was spray clear gloss glaze on a whole batch of horses, so I'm surrounded by these lovely shiny white horses at the moment! They all look so wonderful in glossy white, sometimes I wonder why anyone would want to color them.