A Lesson Learned...or Do Fairies Boobs Glow?

Ok I am going to share with you a hard lesson I have learned with my face canes but first I want to tell you more than you want to know about how this cane came about. Last September I was lucky enough to spend some wonderful time in Utah with several polymer clay artists. One of these was Lori O Follett who makes beautiful fairies and mermaids out of polymer clay. I was inspired by her work and decided that when I returned home I would do a fairy cane. Now you have read about my troubles with matching the browns on my African woman cane so I decided to go back to the Kato flesh color. (I knew I had plenty) Well one of the things I am trying to tackle with my face canes is shading. I want to have shading so they don't look quite so cartoony. The above picture is a picture of a the cane before it was reduced. (Ignore the green blobs and other stray blobs of clay - I can't keep my work surface clean!) Now notice the lovely shading in her arms. See the lovely shading and shape of her breasts. Notice now the lovely fingers and detail in her fingernails. You can alos see the folds in her clothing. Oh Yes, this was some time consuming work and attention to detail here. I think I spent a week building this particular cane. OK now comes the reduction. OK not too bad the middle of the cane where her mouth and nose must not have been as warm as the rest of the cane so her eyes ended up being a little big but I think to myself well she's a fairy. A mythical creature. Maybe they have bigger eyes. But then the killer (and the hard lesson) comes. When I bake a slice of her I see that since I used Kato flesh and this has a large amount of translucent in it so everywhere that I added white to lighten it became more opaque. Thus the "glowing" boobs. I don't have a picture to show you. Anybody who was at Clay Carnival and got one of my poker chips with my fairy is now nodding their heads and agreeing. Well she is mythical so maybe fairy boobs do glow. The lesson of course is that now I mix all my flesh colors (with formulas so I can make more). Here endith the lesson.