Sorry for just how stagnant the blog has been lately. I just finished writing my second book (well, technically third book, but the second was just a revised edition of my first). That's meant a lot of very long days and almost no sculpting for the last few months and no time to look for resources of interest to sculptors.

I hope to have more time to devote both to sculpting and this site now, however. I've got a couple of pieces in progress and will again be looking for links of interest to sculptors, so stand by.

Well... my life-size bust jumped off the modeling stand. Twice.

Okay, maybe it didn't jump, maybe I didn't do a very good job with the support. I lifted the sculpt up to give me room to do the head and shoulders, but in doing so, I lifted the neck above the dowel. My first attempt at fixing it failed, and now the head is squished beyond all recognition.

Ah, well. I'm jumping all over the place and finding it hard to find time to sculpt. I've been doing a little bit of work in epoxy, and have a small wax study going. I've still got the dancing girl, but haven't done much with it for a while. I'm paralyzed because I can't figure out what I should do for her hair, so she's just sitting on a shelf.

Bit of a rut. Oh, well.

A while back, I posted that I was involved with a project that wouldn't leave me much time for sculpting or posting here for a while. Boy was I right about that; I never intended to be away this long. The book took a lot longer than I expected it to, and there has been continued demands on my time even after the book was finished that I never anticipated. Things like dealing with addenda and answering reader letters and questions has taken a lot of my time lately.

The book has been phenomenally successful. Computer programming books don't typically sell a lot of copies, but ours has been selling better than most. We've spent most of the last three months with an Amazon rank below #200, and have often been at or below #100. I haven't received any royalty checks yet, so I don't know exactly how many we've sold, but based on our BookScan numbers, it looks like we've sold almost 18,000 copies in a little under four months. It's no Harry Potter, but for a programming book, that's a smash.

The other side of the equation is that my work life has gotten much busier as a result of the success of the book, and that hasn't left me much time for sculpting or posting.

So, long story short, my life has been hectic, which is why you haven't seen many posts here. I have been doing some sculpting, though, and I thought I would post some pictures of the piece I'm working on. These are going to be in backwards chronological order, so the first pictures are what it looks like today, and then as you scroll down, you'll go backwards in time. You can click on the picture for a slightly larger image. These are just cell-phone snapshots, so the quality isn't great - sorry about that.

Just a little update on the piece I've been spending time on lately. The first version of her head looked like Samuel L. Jackson, which just wouldn't do. I've made it more feminine, but it's obviously still pretty rough. I haven't paid much attention to the lower-half yet, the legs are pretty much a mess, but the top half is slowly starting to come together.

You can see from the pictures that I've garroted the head to work on the facial details better.

There are a lot of things I don't like, but quite a few that I actually do, which is not typical for me, so I'm pretty happy with this one so far.

After several months of not much time for sculpting, I'm trying to motivate myself to dive back in. I've got two works in progress from before I started the book project that I haven't completely given up on yet, though I'm guessing that its' going to take starting a new sculpt to get me back into the swing of things. It's hard to work up the motivation to pick up a piece after being away from it for several months, but a good idea for a new sculpt can often get me gung-ho.

Anyway, this one's been around for a while, and it's still hanging in there. I threw away the arms, but I think the rest of it can be salvaged. This one's done in Chavant professional, and since my studio isn't heated, it's as hard as a rock and hard to work at the moment, but I am planning to revisit her when I find the motivation.

I'm not sure why her right eye (our left) in the picture looks like it's not there. The sculpt does have two eyes.

Here, finally, are some more pictures of the Rocket Girl WIP, though there really hasn't been much progress since the last post. I added a little bulk to the face, but haven't touched the eyes yet. This piece is done in polymer clay, but some of the clay is old and crumbly and reconditioning it wasn't 100% successful, so I may have to take parts of it down to the metal.

The legs are too long. And though I rather like long legs, and intended this piece to be rather leggy, I think I took it too far. I might be able to lower the crotch a bit, but I'm thinking I will have add some height to the base to fix this.