When the (sculpting) innocence ends...

Sculpting has been a part of my life since I was 7 years old. I have always been "creative". You might know me best for my sculpting but in fact I am also into photography, into scrapbooking, into drawing and very into organizing parties and Cooking/BAKING!!! (don't want to toot my own horn but I have several deserts I am famous for in my social circle).

Anyway, at first, you start off with stars in your eyes that WOW you can create THAT... if you manage to sell your work WOW again, people want to spend money on it! And it goes on and on and on like that...
Now you are a successful, professional artist, congratulations... and that's just about when the innocence for me ended.
I have started becoming VERY critical about my work. I have always been a perfectionist at heart (even though sometimes time restraints won't let me get a sculpt to where I think is best - for instance when you have been working on a sculpt for a few months and it starts drying out), so this newfound self-critisism is not helping.

I did all the preparations including having special molds done for my first self-produced vinyl kit, only to chicken out at the last moment thinking it is not a good enough sculpt afterall...
So I started over, going a completely different direction (chunky newborn as opposed to scrawny preemie)... and I am still going...and going. I had a set of limbs I had made for another head earlier in the year but since they turned out a little small, for that head, I put them aside... they seem to fit this head quite nicely though so I might be using...might being the operative word here.

I see the sculpt and sometimes I feel very good about it, sometimes I don't like it and I keep thinking of so many other artists out there, younger than me (and a lot less anal about it than me lol) getting kits out like it is nothing... and I am STILL looking for the "perfect" one. Is there such a thing? Have I become too old (or too wise???) to just close my eyes and "jump" and enjoy the ride? Why am I looking for assurances so badly? Is it because I put food on the table doing this? Why am I measuring and re-measuring, changing and re-changing my sculpt?? Have I lost my "wind" or my inspiration??

Why do I need a computer to tell me that yes my sculpt is more or less symmetrical and also, yes I do need to move that ear and the fontanel a little bit... why do I *need* it so badly?
Is it because making a vinyl kit is so expensive?? Or it is because I am suddenly chickening-out??
Or is it maybe because I want to provide YOU, the customer, with something extraordinary??

Maybe I need to remind me of what I tell my students... sculpting comes from the heart, not from technology... So I will make me some coffee, put on my favorite music and sit down quietly and fall in love all over again with that little baby waiting on my work desk... and I will whisper sweet words into her/his still unfinished ears like I do with all my babies, and dream about the baby s/he will be once put together, and not think of how much money s/he will cost me or wonder if I can pay the therapies I am several months behind at, with the money I might make from the kit in the long-run.

To be continued...