Thanks to a bitterly-cold Canadian winter, I was forced to take a month-long break from sculpting to fend off a cough and some nasty germs. I still have a bit of a cough from the dry, artificial heat when I'm indoors.
I finally returned to sculpting again today and feel reinvigorated. I accomplished a great amount of work in a short span of an hour and fifteen minutes, due in part to the temper-tantrum which was the stone-sculpting equivalent of hurtling chairs across the room. In the end, I was able to remove large sections of stone and, surprisingly, didn't break the sculpture as I have in the past.
The sculpture is now at my favourite phase---the one where I employ all of my rifflers to refine its shape. This is my favourite phase because the bulk of the difficult work (defining the predominant shape) has been completed, but creative exploration is still involved (unlike the final sanding & polishing phase, where it is mostly meditative).
