His fur is finally done, phew! I finished it yesterday. I also did his undershirt, since it will need to be done before I add any clay details.
Today I will be working with the clay for his clothes and accessories. This will be the fun part!

The weather hasn't been cooperating. It's been very chilly on the porch, too cold for painting. Finally it occurred to me to bring a little heater out! Viola!
So here he is after some more work on the fur. The fur is going to be the longest part to paint I think. The rest is much more simple. He looks a lot darker than he will be. He's going to be a red squirrel.
I was worried his tail would be too plain, it's a huge part of him and so far I hadn't come up with any design elements to add to it. So even though squirrels' tails don't really look like this, I love the pinwheel design.

Here he is after the first 2 days of painting. Not much to really look at yet. I'm just trying to get some of the texture for the fur into the base coat.

This is the sketch I submitted. The actual squirrel will look a bit different. After going over ideas from the sponsor and program director we came up with some pretty neat ideas for this project. I'll be adding a lot of details from Jimmy Buffet's songs.