Finished "Guilt", second "Rivers of Silver" mask, plus lessons-learnt

 I'm calling my second mask in the "Rivers of Silver" series, complete. Meet "Guilt":

On the whole, I'm very pleased with it. Having allowed it to 'settle' a bit, I decided I had the same 'spam' problem as "Regret" - because the masks go quite far back, and don't have hair (I did once drape my daughter's hair over "Regret", something I can't unsee), they end up with a massive forehead or 'spam' as we used to call it in my cornish secondary school. In this case I fixed this by adding some detail which I love - I used dried conifer leaves to create find branching 'capillaries' of gold:

I like the way they seem to grow over and into the forehead. 

The other problem I had was that the mouth looked wrong... I generally work on a 'lazy' principle in life, and especially in art - I do the minimum to obtain a good result ;) Albeit I have a high standard for 'good'! Here that backfired in a way that was suddenly obvious with a bit of 'distance', but wasn't obvious at the time - I'd let the (now unused) holes in the corners of the mouth remain. The way I worked this out was quite useful to remember - I felt the mouth looked good in the newspaper stage, but bad in the painted stage... So something must have changed, and I eventually realised it was that the black holes now looked like part of the dark blue lips. I stopped them up with a mixture of toilet tissue and PVA, which forms a magical putty-like substance, which takes about 2 years to dry... I waited as long as I could bare, crossed my fingers, and painted over them!

Once I was completely happy with everything, I painted over it all with a black wash, taking care to apply more in the darker areas (to complement the existing tinting) and wiping it away from the highest highlights over the nose and brows.

Overall I like the branches, although they are perhaps not as evocative/viseral as I hoped, I'm not sure why, and I'm not beating myself up about it, but i have it hanging on my "finished mask on probation" nail in my dining room, and I'll try to reflect a bit more on it emotionally once the angst of the technical production has faded a bit.

Lessons learnt (trying to do this more systematically):

• Poster paints are the work of satan
• Gloss or egg-shell house paint is wonderful stuff
• Incorporating materials to add detail (string on Regret, plant material on Guilt) is a great way to add more detail than I could ever hope to model, and also helps to tie my work to a sense (albeit private to me) of place and material
• I am still afraid to let the materials show (huh!) and want to cover everything in paint - I wonder why? Nature represents peace and the escape from pain (see "Quenched") so it makes sense here, but seems to be a general trend, perhaps... Something to consider for "Acceptance" when I eventually get to it
• The consistency and parallels between "Guilt" and "Regret" tie them into a series, which will hopefully be stronger than the sum of the parts, especially as I add more, and should be extended to new masks, most obviously the use of gold to represent pain, silver for sorrow, and the presence of some form of head-gear
• Black washing at the end adds a lot of texture and interest and character that is hard to get by applying tints by hand - interestingly it highlights the flaws in the surface ("your finger prints are literally all over it")
• I can build up fairly naturalistic features, although I can get better at this
• I can build up fairly convincing, if exaggerated expressions, which might be an interesting thing to explore further (viz JK's feedback to look at noh)
• The branches DO capture a sense of the ingrowing, painful, messiness of guilt, although the branch up the nose might be distracting?
• I'm still somewhat producing the masks in three broad stages - concept, initial execution, refinement... I think JK was pushing me to think more holistically at each stage (huh!) - execution should flow with concept - think of the mask as a living thing AS you make it, not a project to be completed AFTER concept
• I really do like doing series, I didn't think I did, but I do!
• When I wear the mask (it's quite hard to wear because I stupidly extended the neck area making it very tight against my throat), the branch that's in "Guilt's" mouth is in MY mouth - while I didn't do that on purpose, it did it itself and I had the sense to keep it!

When I have the full set, I want to get help to do a photo-shoot of me wearing all the masks, sitting at a table, composited together - I want to act out each mask's character as I wear it. I would LOVE to get permission to do this in an interesting space like an old building (great suggestion from a friend).

What else could I, should I, do with them? Do they have a life with me (weirdly the opposite of something Roz said to me - she wants her work to live without her, here I need to make my work live WITH me)?

Right, I'm off for a wee before I wet myself.