Weekend project

Aetheline helping clean Mary up – removing paint flakes and dirt with  a toothbrush.

Of course, she had to brush her teeth. 🙂

Pascal preferred blasting the dirt off with the hose.

All cleaned up, ready for primer and new paint!

 I did the rest of the painting myself, with a little bit of ‘help’ from Aetheline whenever she caught me at it. I used an all-surface primer that the fellow at the hardware store recommended.

Mary, white as the driven snow. 🙂

Primed and ready!

 Then I painted over the primer with acrylic craft paints. The great part about that is that I could easily fix mistakes with a wet rag, wiping the fresh acrylic off of the dry primer.

I decided to make the underside of Mary’s cloak light blue. A blue cloak over a white dress would be my preference, but this way conserved my art paints a bit!

Mixing flesh tones is tricky: this is a mix of white, cranberry red, raspberry red,  and a little bit of brown and yellow. It’s still not as tan as I would have liked.

 Here’s a couple of pictures of the (almost finished) statue. Sorry for the poor quality, I took all of these with my phone rather than my camera.

 You can’t really see it in these pictures, but I tried to give the outer cloak some more depth by adding light blue ‘shadows’ and then wiping most of them away with a damp cloth, so that it only remains very lightly in the folds. 

I finished the statue with a semi-gloss coat of clear spray-on outdoor masonry finish. Mom is pretty pleased, and I really enjoyed myself! I would have liked to play a bit more with adding shading and depth, but Aetheline was far too interested in ‘helping’, and the forecast was for rain, so I just finished up instead.

Maybe next weekend we’ll get a chance to get her set up somewhere nice on the property, and we’ll have a little installation crowning!