WIP: Time and Tide

Clay (Low-fire Terra Cotta), unfired: 9" tall

I've just started following Andrew-Brady, but a love the fresh, clean character of his paintings.  I ran across his piece, "Time and Tide" ( andrew-brady.deviantart.com/ar… ), and thought it would be a perfect piece to do as a sculpture.

The photo here is intentionally framed to line up with Andrew's original painting, though it obviously has a lot of other interesting angles.

(I'm still working on a title, since I don't want to just copy the original... but I'm having a hard time coming up with something else that so elegantly expresses the heart of the piece.)


Something learned in this piece:  One of the aspects of the original which drew me so strongly to the piece was the precise angle of her head - slightly leaned to the side and looking down almost between her feet.  It was a really difficult angle to get right... until I realized something about anatomy.  If you tilt your head, you find that the skull gimbals almost at the base of the skull, not by leaning the neck at the shoulders.  Once I realized this, it became a lot easier to get the right angle of the head.  I have a feeling this is what goofed up when trying to do my Guest House sculpture ( observer14.deviantart.com/art/… ), and I never did really get the head right.

UPDATE:
Well, this piece just exploded in the kiln.
Not sure yet what happened, but there must have been some internal stresses in the clay.  I definitely know it was dry enough, so it wasn't trapped steam.  Thankfully, it didn't damage any other pieces next to it, even though the blast was strong enough to scatter pieces throughout the kiln.
UPDATE II:
I was able to recover enough of the fragments to piece this back together.  I will try to put up some photos of the result.  It was most difficult to recover her right hand (the one on her head), as the fingers must have gone in all directions.  I got enough to suggest the pose, so it's not too bad.

I will return to this piece again, lessons learned, to try again.  The original was just too good to let this setback stand... 

(*sigh*)