Ticking off the 'to do' list

It's been a bitty kind of week (again). Painting up all the new pieces - adding hand made paper to each figure (nice fiddly job - especially at these sizes), covering the bases and adding paint. Inevitably something ugly pops out on an earlier piece then I have to go fix it. Spotted a leg that from one angle looked really chunky so out with the craft knife to make it a bit more elegant. And a hand on another older piece that looked so weird I don't know how I didn't notice it before.

And painting skin areas. Bane of my life. Skin tones of any type are hard to get right but when you don't want them to be totally realistic but not flat and weird coloured either...you get some hybrid notquiterightlooking effect. Doing dark skin tones is much easier since I can add metallics to give a really nice kind of mocha look. But for whites, urgh. I stuck a layer of actual 'flesh' tone on one piece. It looks like a corpse. I can't even match my own not pale but not dark skin colour. Maybe I should just leave all skin and hair as white and only colour the clothed parts. You'd think this would all be worked out by now but no. Work in progress since the very beginning.

This little piece on the right is really dainty and even the skin tone is nice. I know arabesques and attitudes are a bit cliched in dance sculpture but it is a nice shape so who can blame anyone for trying to capture it? For all the apparent ease of the pose it makes your back, hip and bum work very hard! But the base has been white then blue then white again. And I want to add a bit more warmth to her leo and match it to the swirl which will go on the base. Just a gentle dusting of colour with the paler blue showing through.

I also actually got something practical done by putting in an order for boxes. It came really quickly. And they were the wrong size. Longer, wider and too shallow. The company said they'd sort it and I could keep the ones sent in error (I only ordered 10). The correct ones arrived equally speedily. Now to customise them a bit.

As for the first batch, got one or two ideas on how to use them. At a pinch they could fit a small canvas but I want to try a different type of wall art since there's much more scope to play with different movements in 2D. But no! Finish this batch, get the photos done and get the shop set up before I do anything else. Gawd, it's so easy to get distracted and start trying something new. Before I even think about that, the disaster zone work area needs clearing up. You can probably tell how bad it is by the area behind my photos - a mixture of art materials, books and masses of paper with ideas and scribbles of things for my writing projects and half a dozen sculptures in various stages of completion. Like most people who do creative stuff, the work area ends up a mess again as soon as it gets tidied. You have to learn to live with that unless you've got a good sized space to work in. Some day...