This one is about 6" tall, maybe a little taller, and I thing it's a female. She's looking up and smiling because there's a delightful little sun-shower, and she wants to catch a few drops on her dry, sunbaked arms.
My father mentioned the idea of a "beaming Saguaro" to me one day, and it just seemed as though it would make a charming sculpture. Usually I make dryads pretty much human, but a saguaro already has an upright posture, arms in the right places, and the look of some kind of giant of the desert; why not just give it a personality and let it keep it's form? Making this sculpture presented a challenge, because even though it's small, the arms are only attached in a small area to a thin trunk and Sculpy gets very soft while it's baking. I finally ended up inserting a piece of medium-weight wire into each piece, inserting the ends of the wire into the trunk or base, and then propping with big chunks of foil while baking. Because it was my first one done this way and I was kind of making it up as I went alone, it probably took me four or five hours.
