big fox

I feel boring this week, because I only worked on the big fox, but then, I worked on it a lot.

fox body (with a print of the head), about 70% of the way there - still need to carve the back right leg and the lowers next to back left leg and where the hips meet the tail

[bleep], - that's a lot of tiny, carved lines. ( O:) ). Trying to get the texture of the fur, without loosing sight of the underlying muscle structure, and also indicating a change in the color of the fur...Eep!

I'm surprised, even working very hard on this, that there's so much progress on this block.  Because the Gothic Tree took a couple of months to carve, I thought the fox body would take longer than a week or two - this is a very rare instance, where it went much faster than expected (*though I hesitate to say that until it's actually proofed - still enough road left to hit a speed bump.)

In a way, Honey is partly to thank for this.  My little bear has a thing about chewing on sticks  

emerging from the woods with a giant stick.

Look at that face! 

She's getting so big, and while I was at work, she escaped her baby gated area and went into my work space. She decided to use her new found freedom to chew up the handles of her human's favorite-no long produced dockyard micro gouges. When I saw, I cried (after putting her safely back in the kitchen and hunting down all the tips - thankfully, she was not interested in swallowing the metal parts - no pet ER visit in this story!)  

it was a sad day in Artlandia

I really do need these to carve, and they aren't easily replaceable (even if I weren't attached to my particular tools, which I am :) ).  On top of this, I recently learned that my main paper source is closing and my favorite type of blocks have been discontinued [whine/sigh/whine].  I was very sad.

Thankfully,  I mentioned the unfortunate puppy chewing tools incident to sculptor Dave Cole the next day, and he graciously made new handles for the tools!  They're back, even better than before, and I was so happy, that I carved and carved and carved. (And now the world is that much closer to having a life-scale art fox in it O:) ).

These pictures do a good job illustrating why I am recarving the block at life-scale:

This is printed from the polyester lithography
plates that are blown up from the small fox
relief print

This is the newly carved version (thumbs up!)

And now...favorite flowers of the week!