Ok, so here's my most ambitious leather project so far. As you can see, it's more of a sculptural wall piece than a wearable mask, however, it's based off my previous mask ideas. This piece took nearly a whole side of leather and is 3 feet high by 6 feet long. I started out by drawing the flowing hair onto paper and then transfered it to the leather as usual. A lot of hours went into this because I wanted it to be all one piece of leather, and I wanted the hair to look graceful, kind of like it would in water. It seemed to take forever to cut it all out. It was so huge I had to soak it in the bathtub and lay it out on towels in my living room. As I worked from the face outward, I used damp towels to keep the tips wet. I worked at an extremely fast pace to try and shape it all in one go. I worked non-stop for 4 1/2 hours just getting it shaped. Luckily, my trusty heat gun helped speed things up and by the end of the day I had something I liked. Believe it or not, the tips of my fingers were raw nubs when I finished. Yikes!! But it was worth it.
I took it to my studio the next day and painted the back with a clear coat of spray paint to help give it some structure and then hit it with a coat of metallic taupe spray paint. I got a little weak after emptying those two cans and realized that I would be a terrible mother because my chihuahua was asleep inside my coat the whole time. While laying in the grass outside my studio, waiting for the air to clear and wondering if my lungs would ever recover, I pondered the idea of being a mother and decided against it when I pictured my studio with a makeshift crib holding an infant sleeping restlessly under a heavy fog of carcinogenic fumes. "It'll never work," I told myself when it dawned on me that respirators don't come in a size "tiny".
This is a photo with a more dramatic light on it. It took several hours to paint the front because I used two different acrylic metallic colors and blended the shadows and highlights to add even more depth.
