Jidge: George Herman Ruth

This is my life now.  I work in the sawdust after my day job and put in 11 or 12 hours per day, every day.  One day a week on average, I’m too tired to do the sawdust gig, so that’s only 6 of 7 days.  Is it worth it?  I don’t know.  Sometimes I wonder.  The payoffs are sporadic but powerful.  Usually at the end of a night, you look at the thing and you really can’t believe you did it.  It’s a moment that happens now and again and it’s really neat.  That’s the best I can describe it.

The head is NOT FINISHED!  The buyer is actually waiting for shots of it and this is premature so I have to say that.  It is mostly shaped but not painted at all.  It has just been installed atop the torso and the area around it needs to be done so that it can be airbrushed to look like skin/hair etc.  Before I can do that, I need to put on many, many coats of sealer and sand quite a bit.  You can’t have any joinery lines showing through on the head as touchups with an airbrush are not what I  want to be doing…ever.  So I do put a pink paint on the skin areas with a brush and I do white the eyes and color in an eyeball with a black sharpie so that I can “see” what I need to see to keep going, but it is by no means done.

Trust me, it looks like Babe Ruth.  It’s unmistakeable.  My focus groups have all liked it so I am confident.  Normally, I do the head last and plop it on and paint it very late in the project.  For this one, I am doing it earlier so that my customer can get an earlier look at it than typically.  The other thing to know is that it is very difficult to photograph these statues.  You have to work at it to get a good photo and I’ve yet to see the photo that is 1/10 th as compelling as seeing it in person.

What else is in the photo?  Well, the hands are sitting there on the top shelf on the right, almost ready to go.  The mask is now required and is darned uncomfortable.  The headphones are my newest innovation.  They are from The Sportsman’s Guide, a great cattle book that I like.  They are a universal, wireless headphone system.  There is a little transmitter that plugs into any device that has an audio-out or headphone jack.  It comes with RCA’s and 1/8th inch jack.  It broadcasts up to 8 meters but I tested it to further than that and through walls as well.  I use it to listen to TV, radio and MP3 while I sculpt and the phones are noise blockers for the chainsaw, sanders and die grinders.

Oh, and since someone will ask; no, you don’t put the arms on until you are done mostly with what would be underneath them.  Once the arms are on, you are not getting behind there very easily.  You do the easy stuff first, and eventually, the hard stuff becomes easy stuff.  If you look at the figure and see something that doesn’t belong, you take it off.  Usually, with the chain saw.  When I think I did my first two statues withOUT the chainsaw…grrr…