Each day spent working on the sculpture focuses on a different part such as shaping the legs or smoothing the arms. I start by sanding it with coarse sandpaper to remove sand-like clumps on the surface and remove high spots. Sandpaper works wonders by making the high spots appear slightly lighter in colour than the untouched low spots. It instantly shows how bumpy the surfaces are even though they were smoothed as best as possible with my fingertips when the clay was soft. As I continue sanding, the light coloured high spots grow in size until eventually the low dark spots disappear. However, I have to be careful because not all high spots are unwanted. For example, throughout the process I have to keep reshaping features such as ankle bones so that they are not lost.
There are also areas where insufficient clay is present. If I sand it all the way down to the bottom of the low spot then the shape will become unbalanced. For example, if one leg has too deep of a low spot on a thigh and I sand it all the way down to the bottom, this thigh will be smaller than the one on the other leg. To keep the princess balanced these areas that are too low have to be left for now and once the entire sculpture is sanded I'll go over it and add a thin layer of clay to them.
Throughout the building of the sculpture, the hair has had many layers added by people helping out. I completed the forshape by adding a few more layers of Winterstone in specific areas to bring it into the proper final shape then added a layer of icing and dragged my putty knife through it to create hair-like swoops. It created a nice dragon-burned look. Perfect! The hair is complete.
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