My ticket-picking nature (painfully) makes for some meticulously detailed geckos..

I have been thoroughly smitten with geckos since I was a child but don't think I remembered that until I saw the Geiko gecko. In fact, in studying the critter for sculpting, I became so enamored of them, that I've been thinking of adding a gecko to the family. I do love my critters!

I start a lot of my pieces covered with black clay; they're all sculpted in relief and later hand-painted. The results can be very dramatic as shown with the potion bottle below. This is an example of a piece that was covered with individually sculpted and textured black clay elements. 

 I started this same process with my geckos and while some of my latest itty-bitty lizards were by far better than any before (I even got all 5 of their toes this time!), the geckos still could be better... A fact that I decided after much researching and web browsing and window shopping and convincing myself that I need one.  It was in trying to decipher how to realistically portrait their gorgeous coloring. All of these little guys had white, pale or pastel bellies, where as my critters' bellies are as black as the inside of a cow. And you can see it too, if you care to flip it up and have a look, tho in this case bottom gecko looks like his got his best biker pants on!

BTW no, I've never poked my head in a cow's innards, nor would I like to; in any innards for that matter! I just imagine it'd be pretty darn dark in there.

So my latest foray into the gecko-making are tiny potion bottles made from recycled insulin bottles. I have created three gecko bottles using the black clay base method. One is a granite urn, one is old wooden slats, and the other is river stone. All the geckos were initially black, but after the whole big Pale-Belly-Fiasco (which of course, came post baked gecko), I decided to just paint the little farts "pale belly." The granite gecko has been painted wet on wet with minimal dry brushing.

It's hard to see the colors as the flash has just about bleached them away.

The other two, I just wised up and painted them as evenly-covered "pale belly" as I could get them. The wood gecko is our lucky model.  I'm planning on perhaps trying oil on one or both of them.

I'm planning to change the gecko color next time from black to some sort of custom mixed translucent and go from there. More on that when I get the nerve.