A difficult task.

So Yesterday turned out to be one of the most difficult days of the project so far. I was tasked with making a set of twins... a set of very small twins (as well as their parents). I was given a photo of the family together, but it was requested that all 4 sculptures be separate. So I added the challenge of getting them all to fit together as in the original photo and also be separate pieces. This task proved to be a moderate pain (getting the arms to match up), but nothing compared to trying to make the two little girls. On top of the fact that a child's face has a somewhat different anatomical structure than an adult face, I also had to make two that looked very alike, and do it on a small scale. You see the thing with metal is, as you may have learned through life experience, it's not very malleable; it's unforgiving. So to make these two faces on this tiny scale and working with tools that are more or less designed to work on bridges and building structures... well, it's difficult. In fact at one point I threw my hat on the ground and walked off shaking with aggravation for at that point I had rebuilt the faces nearly 10 times each. There was one instance where I had successfully built the nose and eyes of one of the faces and was welding on the upper lip, when a slight miscalculation in my welding led to complete ruination of the face and I had to grind it all off and start over again. So even though it seems like the smaller the project the quicker and easier it would go, often it's just the opposite. For me the greatest challenge truly is the smallest work, and that is partly why I took on this project, to challenge myself, to get good at doing the hardest project I could think of so that it will easily translate itself to the larger, slower, more deliberate work... and I must say I'm looking very forward to the next massive sculpture. Whew.