Day #10, starting to paint

I brought my bear back to the motel with me last night and finished separating all the hair with a scalpel so I was a little ahead of Jan this morning. When he caught up, we started applying the Drake's X-1 as a stiffener. Once that's applied, the hair can be sort of shaped and when the sealer dries, it will stay that way. Here's a picture after all the hair has been lifted and shaped. It's funny, the hair doesn't look nearly that "clumpy" in real life. The hair on mine is longer than on Jan's. I have never liked it when I tried long hair before, but I got way behind when we started and was trying to catch up so I made it longer (less cutting). Jan said he actually liked the long hair better, that it looked like a winter coat.

Then this afternoon we started on the painting. We started with the shadowing. Jan is really fast with this part, I was standing there with my mouth open thinking "wait for me!!!!". I watched how he did his, then I tried to do something that sort of resembled what he was doing. One thing I found out was that I have been trying to paint hair like this with the wrong kind of brush. Jan told me to get some stiffer brushes, he suggested hog bristle. It seemed like they did a lot better job of applying paint to the tips of the hair but allowing you to still see some leather underneath. Sometimes when Jan concentrates really hard for a long time, his hands start to get shaky so we quit a few minutes early. Heck, my hands were shaky just cuz I was scared I'd mess up! Well, here's how it looked when I left. I got some different brushes so hopefully I can do a decent job of painting tomorrow.