My first artisitic endevor!

I am an Electrical Engineer by education and an extremely analytical person.  Artistic talent has always been the furthest thing from my brain, it was almost like kryptonite!  Yesterday I grabbed this meerschaum skull and claw and decided to play with it. 

Any time I do anything to a pipe for the first time I err on the extreme side of caution because you can't un-ring a bell.  This guy had a "lot" of character and I didn't want to remove any of the original artists intent.  I wish I had taken pictures before I started.  My first task was to remove a nasty scratch above and behind his left eye.  I started with 6000 micro mesh and went up to 120000.  It was clear that I needed more oomph and that the meerschaum was strong enough to handle it so I started with 1500 and slowly went through all nine pads.

As I became more involved in the personality the former pirate (my assertation) I soon started finding myself looking more closely at his battle scars and branching out with the micro mesh.  As I spent an hour or so playing with his skull I found myself classifying his imperfections into two categories, those intentionally given by the carver and those he may have incurred since then; I did not want to remove any of the carvers marks even if they were signs of lesser quality. 

The brow of his right eye socket obviously suffered a distinct blow which I was not going to remove but I did clean up numerous other things like a series of scratches on the bridge between his right eye and temple.  In general he went from looking like a battle hardened pirate who has also been a bit abused, to a cool old fella who looks a lot better today than he did yesterday!

All in all, it felt a little bit weird to disengage my analytical brain and let some artistic waves flow through it as I let myself live the life of this old pirate for a while.  But I have to admit, I enjoyed it   Maybe it was the head-cold medication