Sea Otter

Another foray into marble. This piece depicts a sea otter floating on its back cracking open a clam with its favorite rock, as they are known to do. The fun part of this piece was to depict the otter floating halfway out of the water and halfway under water- if you can imagine the otter bottoms out at the bottom of the stone. Unfortunately a wet otter is not smooth, so depicting wet fur was a bit of a challenge; when you work with marble the draw is that you can make the surface smooth and shiny. Well not with wet fur. To counter that, the surface of the water hopefully contrasts that, with a smooth shine on rippling water and of course a wet smooth otter tail and wet rock and clam. Getting texture out of rock is a challenge, something I need to work on. But this was a fun piece and I am satisfied with the result, which actually started out as a simple doodle in a sketchbook several years ago- this is why you never throw out those filled sketchbooks as you never know what’s going to spark an idea!

4 out of 5, don’t like the flippers. 12”L x 5”W x 6”H