This doll thing is starting to feel like theater–as soon as the closing night curtain comes down, I’m running around looking for the next show. I hadn’t planned on it, but now I’m doing Molly Cromwell’s Sturbridge Massachusetts show on June 5th & 6th. She had a cancellation, and I’d been hearing good things about this show. The table was cheap too, only $195. So with hardly a chance to breathe after Chicago, here I am down to the wire trying to re-fill my table for the Sturbridge show. The past few weeks have been spent finishing several commission jobs, but I managed to sneak one new one in there. This is Grace, my first sucessful try at an African-american figure. I still haven’t managed to finish the African mermaid–I sculpted her from light colored clay, then tried to paint her. After stripping the paint for the third time, I just set her aside out of frustration.
Grace was sculpted using that weird “ethnic brown” Prosculpt. It’s nasty. The color is very flat “tootsie roll” brown, leaving little room for variation in skin tone. It has a rather different texture than the light colored Prosculpt, and tends to stain my fingers, and everything else it gets on. But in spite of the stuff, I think Grace turned out ok. Next time I might mix the brown stuff with some lighter clay, just to knock it back a little and leave me room for some tonal variations. Always a learning experience, every one of them.
