Water based Clay Sculpture Figure Study

My wonderful and astute husband, Scott, realizing that I've been feeling creatively stifled, gave me the sculpture class of my choice for Christmas. It was really hard to choose, but decided upon Andi Mascarenas's class offered by the Denver Art Students League. I figured that the longer class schedule would be a good discipline for me. The first class was Wednesday, with Andi teaching. On Fridays we have open studio time. We started the class with 10-20 minute gesture poses to warm up and then started a longer pose. This sculpture is about 4 hours of work. The sticks are wooden skewers that are helping to support the water-based clay while the sculpture dries a bit. When it's leather-hard, I'll remove the sticks and hollow her out a bit, repair the holes and let her dry slowly - but first I'll put some more work into her.

I no longer have access to the model or the pose, and the sculpture is intended as a study only, however I feel I can do some more work on her from my memory and will post newer (and hopefully better lit photos!) in the next week. This sculpture is 11" from base to top of head.