Post #476928 by woofmutt on Wed, Aug 12, 2009 11:51 PM

Good answer, Vincent.

Funny you did the monkey cuz I was thinking of writing you...

Some years back my mom and a friend of her's got into casting silver jewelry. They mostly used pre-made commercial wax pieces but I had an idea...

My good friend Max had a thing for monkeys (way before the current monkeys-are-everywhere trend) and I wondered if a Barrel of Monkeys monkey could be cast in silver.

Turns out it can.

It came out brilliantly and Max tied it to a chord (no finding had been cast into the piece) and disco danced his way across LA until a hot gal and good money nailed him down into a Beachwood Drive house with a vacation home in Palm Springs.

Also the dumbass somehow happened to lose the monkey one day. Right off his friggin neck.

I thought about suggesting to you that maybe this would be the sorta thing you could crap out like so many of us hacks and make a few bucks between actual artsy fartsy pieces.

But then you went and sculpted yer own.

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The leaf is neat, the curve of it's outline and stem are excellent. (People have no idea how important a confidence of line is.) Still, I think it can be moved towards a really swell piece and not particularly with excessive overworking. the weight of the body of the leaf and the "notches" on the leaf don't have the same flow as the leaf's edge and stem. The notches are making it static (or worse: typical), the weight is making it just sit there. At least in this photo.

This I like quite a bit ad I'm kinda surprised I do. It's simplistic and in some ways similar to a few dozen other trinkets we've seen around here but the weight is good and balance...Well, it's the balance that catches and holds the eye. In bronze it would seem like a piece from the golden age of Tiki.