‎"Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain."

-Carl Jung

Getting into the smaller details now. Spent most of the day refining planes, both large and small. Some adjusting of the eye and nose holes. Lots of work around the mouth and jaw, and also starting to delineate the cervical vertebrae. Next session I'll focus on the teeth, which I anticipate will be highly tedious. But it must be done, and I want to do it. It's just going to involve lots of tiny work, with my tiniest tools. And I think I'm still off with much of the jaw and teeth-planes, so I'm sure there will be more adjusting of the form.

Lovely Seattle morning (if, like me, you love this kind of weather). Gray and a bit blustery. All day I could hear the clanging of cables against the sailboat masts as the wind had it's way with them. The afternoon cleared to some sun and a beautiful fall day.

The subtler tweaking phase begins as I start to delineate the smaller planes and features. But I'm really enjoying this whole project. A lot.

Further along although still dealing with primitive planes of the head. I think the ghost of my half-size skeleton is haunting me on this one (hint: I've named him Massive Jaw Jim). That big jaw will be much-reduced in the coming week. I'm also struggling mightily with the eye sockets, but this is good for me. It's exactly what I need to be learning -- the underlying structure of the eyes. A lot of tweaking and reworking in the immediate future on this one --

Day two of the skull sculpt (what the armature was for). I'm using my own skull measurements for it. Let's just hope I have a normal skull..

beautiful black

Wow -- look at that beautiful black ink! I took this photo after it had set for a short while. I can't wait to try it out. I forgot to mention -- I used 5 oz. of iron sulfate to mix with the gall water. But with so many different and wildly varying recipes, it's all just guessing and averaging between them.

Iron gall ink, part 2

I finally braved the goo! I'm sparing you the gory pictures, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be. I strained the ground gall into a bowl (see picture below, and yes that's exactly what it looks like -- thankfully it doesn't smell like that). Then I mixed the ground galls with another cup of water, swished it around and strained it again. Finally, I took out handfuls of the mush and squeezed them hard in my hand to get the last of the liquid out. After it was all said and done I had about 5 or 6 cups of gall liquid.

I picked up some iron sulfate from Seattle Pottery, which is the yellow powder in the white bowl below. The matter of obtaining iron sulfate hasn't been an exact science. If you do a Google image search for "iron sulfate" you'll see a lot of pictures of green powder, some pictures of a white powder, and a few pictures of a yellow powder.  Which is the one I need?  I'm going with the yellow stuff from the pottery supply place.  We'll see how it turns out.  So far, so good --

My apologies for the fuzzy picture below. Had I known the liquid would change so quickly and dramatically after adding the iron sulfate I would have tried harder to take some good before pictures. But below is the best one I have. Prior to adding the iron sulfate, the gall liquid was a reddish-brown color and very watery and transparent --

After adding the iron sulfate it changed quickly right before my eyes, becoming a very dark black color and thickening somewhat. At first it was brown-black but as it sat it became more purple/blue-black. It even stained my fingers black as I worked with it.  Definitely potent stuff, at least in terms of staining. It's a little hard to tell in this photo, but this is what it looked like after adding the iron sulfate --

Now to set it aside to sit for a few more days before the final step...