Venus on the half shell.

Well, she’s completed! And looking as lovely as can be expected for a large, purple monster with a rather interesting concept of fashion.

I did end up using my commercial artist acrylics rather than attempting the paint making myself. I’m still not sure how the egg tempera is going to handle once I have it made so it’s definitely going to be reserved for experiments at first.

Venus' Face

From the head down…the hair is a fuzzy yarn I had on hand. Like fabric, I’ve become entranced with yarn in all it’s many forms, but especially the really soft-looking stuff. I’ve even taken up crocheting again, although it’s on the “hobby” list so I don’t usually have much time to do any. The eye is an acrylic doll eye (I think it’s Tallinas). The bathing suit was sculpted on and then painted.

Side view.

From the side, you can see her saggy belly, hanging just a bit over the teenie bikini bottom. She definitely likes to draw attention to herself. The yellows and reds came straight from the tube but the purple had to be mixed by hand because I didn’t have any purple paint in my stash. Funny thing is that I realized I don’t even have a good set of primary colors on hand. I managed to scrounge up a small bottle of violet and had several blues so I picked on and did a bit of mixing before finally coming up with a dark, purplish blue. Once she was painted and I looked her over, I realized she was still too blue so I did a wash of violet over her to give her the deep purplish look.

Back of the beauty

My kids were tickled that you could see her butt hanging out of her bikini bottoms. And, they’re hard to see but she does have a tiny set of wings under all that hair.

So, when she was all finished up and had hair, I finally decided on a name–Venus. Because I got this mental image of my purple bathing beauty on a clam shell looking like a rather silly version of the Birth of Venus.

Striking a pose