Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from Artlandia!  Things I wanted to do before the end of 2017: more birds.  

 One might think I have enough birds (never!), but there actually are a few poses that I wanted - for example, this side pose leaned back/away (and once I had it facing one way, I thought I might as well carve it going the other way.)

proof of the first state (I went back and did a little more carving
especially around the eye and wings.)

Thinking of carving mirror images, I finally (finally!) carved the front facing bird looking left (to go with the front facing looking right bird from August 2014 . )

bird from
August 2014

  I included a little size variation when carving the inverses (the second ones are both about 12% larger than the first ones). I wanted to be in keeping with the variety of sizes in nature and to make the inverses distinct from the first views.  I plan to use some of these to finish the second border for the fox ).

5 minutes

I spent the last day of 2017 figure drawing, then came home and started reorganizing the studio and sharpening and cleaning all my wood carving tools so they'd be all nice and ready for the start of the new year. :)

I also put new feathers in the cloche and photographed it - getting ready to pack up all the Swallows components for installation January 8th. (Eep!)

10 minutes

In creature news...

It continues to be very, very cold here and Honey continues
to revel in the snow - I marvel at how she's so elegant and content
 in this weather. 

My Princess on the other hand decided that the best place to nap
was on her human's heated shrug...while the human
was wearing it and carving blocks. 

It was time to put away the "ornaments" from the
kitty toy tree. Junior went
right into the box after them to retrieve them,
 "Oh, Human, you dropped these."