The muse is back!

This is my latest doll, in progress. I received some birthday money last month and really treated myself to beads I would not normally splurge on. Although it looks quite planned out, I really just started with the middle round bead and the face (made by Linsart and painted by me) and went from there. I'm trying to work more with a limited color pallet rather than 20 different colors. The limited amount of color is what I like most about my first pieces, so I'm trying to return to my roots, as it were.
This is the most recently finished piece of work. The design is my own, and I did a better job with the gusset this time (always the biggest challenge for me). This time I tried making the pattern out of paper first, and taping the pieces together to make a paper 3-D pattern to see how the gusset would work. It was awkward but I like the results. The wings were my biggest challenge (simply put, I just did not want to do all the beading it would require to make fully beaded, front and back, wings). I finally found these awesome peacock feathers that I attached to wires which had already been embedded in the body, then beaded around the connection points. Yes, it was as much work as you can imagine, but I like the results.

It's been exactly one year since I've created anything. I don't know what happened to the muse. I'd like to figure it out so as not to piss her off and send her away again. I missed her! But now I have ideas coming out of my ears, and already have the next creature developing in my head as I've been working on these two.