More Rock Dwellers

I didn't have much time today to devote to art, but I managed to make these two little owls.  Once again, I am so pleased that I found a great source for these wonderful glass eyes.  They really make the animals come alive, far more so that beads.  I used larger eyes - 4mm - on these owls which are about 1" tall overall.  The owls are sitting on a small quartz rock that I found on my property.  It's stained a bit by all the iron in the soil around here, and no amount of cleaning or bleaching would remove it.  But the color goes just fine with the owls.

By the way, my source for the eyes is http://www.glasseyesonline.com/.

The only problem that I had with these two little ones was one that I could have predicted.  The white clay got terribly dirty no matter how clean I tried to keep my hands.  I have this problem all the time with Fimo Soft clay but it seems especially bad when I'm pairing the white with either black or brown.  Perhaps I'll give Kato or Cernit a try and see if the problem is quite so bad.  Or, instead of begininng with a Skinner blend of white and, for example, brown to get a nice transition from the white belly to the brown back , perhaps I should just make the whole owl brown and add a thin piece of white for the belly at the last minute.  The way I've been working, I'm handling the main piece so much and constantly "tracking" bits of brown over the white.  The mica powders help the problem a little bit, but not enough.  In the end, I antiqued these owls' bellies with a little Burnt Sienna oil paint so that the texture would show, so I guess a clean white belly didn't matter that much after all.

If I keep going at this rate, I should have quite a few new items for the Holiday Art Market.  And I have to say that if I don't sell any I won't be unhappy to keep all these little guys.

Toward the end of working on this piece I thought it might be fun to make a set of five or seven owls in graduated sizes for a necklace.  But for now I'm on a roll with the "rock dwellers."