the body, and a sketch for the next piece

new silhouette

"Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands
Have lopp'd and hew'd and made thy body bare
Of her two branches?"







I'm going to name this new piece "Lavinia," after the daughter of Titus Andronicus. I've actually finished cutting the body, I just have some detailing to do and then I need to figure out how to mount it, and whether or not to matte it.

long overdue

I finally finished a pair of silhouettes I promised to a family friend. The boy's figure contains thorny brambles and roots and bare, angular trees with a single crow perched on one of their branches. I forgot to get pictures of the girl that accompanied this one, but her figure contained raindrops and an underwater scene of fish and octopi meandering across her skirts.

I'm getting the hang of my swiveling Exacto. Honestly, I thought some of the vines in the boy were a little clumsy. If the portrait hadn't been so overdue I would have asked for more time to render a smoother version. The girl turned out pretty well, though.


I was afraid I was going to have to buy a new scanner, which would have set my budget back quite a lot, but this picture actually turned out pretty sharp. In fact, that weird stain in the lower righthand corner? That's a stain on the window, not the paper. The sunlight coming through at six in the evening backlit the silhouette really well, even better than my old scanner would, and I didn't have to adjust the color or saturation to accurately show the woodgrain pattern. This has potential, I think.