Two and half months ago...

This year I've had a lot going on.  One of the biggest happened on May 14th, when my two year old niece died suddenly and my little sister fell off a cliff and died.  Overwhelming is an understatement.

My mom had a thought of my sister Marie sitting next to my niece Gwenyth on grass, waiting for Jesus to come take them to heaven and asked me to make it out of clay for her.  I think I did a good job, but it does make me sad to see it.

Prizes!

On of the websites I'm really involved with, and is a huge creative outlet for me, is Gaia Online.  Mostly a forum, you can create a very detailed avatar with many, many different clothing items.  I love spending time on there, making "outfits," which ends up really just being an exercise in design and composition.

There are a lot of people on Gaia, and many like me, who spend lots of time making great avatars.  I ran a contest recently for a group of people I've "know" for a long time and the winner and runner-up got real life prizes from me.

For the first place winner:

For the runner-up:

 Reference picture:

All the colors: 

Current Projects: Completed!

Two sets of friends have recent gotten married, and I usually do, for those who I know will appreciate it, I made them something!  Both of these pieces illustrate some of the instances in which I have to experiment and fix my work.

I remember to take pictures through parts of the process, so here you go!

This is my clay toaster oven in which I put pieces to wait to finish.  There is an amazing amount of lint in the air and it is really annoying to try and get that off a piece of clay that's completely made, so I try to avoid lint as much as possible.  In the oven you can see the completely finished groom, the bride's dress, and in the background, a wizard.

Here's in the wizard, based off of my friend Larry, and the pieces to make the rogue, based off of my Beth.  I always start with the taller of the two so I can get the proportion correct.  The sheet of clay is what I made Beth's hair out of.  Red hair is a pain to made!  I can never get the color just right, but I think I did a decent job this time.

This is the finished project!  I was working on Beth continuously for a couple of days and forgot to take pictures because I was so focused.  It was really fun!
In the last pictures you can see some small cracks in their face.  The head was the thickest part of the clay and sometimes it can crack- why, I haven't been able to quite figure yet.  I'm in the process of scraping off the top lays of clay so the cracks are less prominent.

This is the groom, my friend Matthew, and the start of the dress for the bride, my friend Dana, as well as the other pieces to make her with.

This is the finished product!  It's kind of hard to tell in this picture, but the train of the dress burned slightly and ended up a different color.  Most of the time when that happens, it doesn't bother me because there's nothing I can do about it. Anyhow, most people don't notice those kinds of things unless I point them out.

I finished the bride and groom the day before the wedding, but at the rehearsal dinner was told the bride changed her hairstyle!  That was okay with me, because I really didn't like how I had done the hair before, so I cut it off and redid it.  I haven't gotten back the pictures of it, but there are some with the bride and groom on their wedding day for comparison I'll share as soon as I get them