The Mount I Took Apart and Started Over

I was three weeks into a red fox commission, posture mostly set, detail work started, when I came into the shop one morning after two days away and looked at it with actually fresh eyes instead of the eyes I’d been using every day while building it. And it was wrong. Not wrong in a way anyone else would’ve clocked walking past it, the kind of wrong that only shows up when you stop looking at a thing incrementally and start looking at it whole.

The weight was sitting too far forward, something about the angle of the head relative to the shoulders that read as alert when the client had specifically wanted relaxed, watchful but not tense. I’d built it exactly to spec technically, correct anatomy, correct proportions, and it still didn’t say the thing it was supposed to say. That’s a strange kind of wrong to explain to someone, because there’s nothing measurably incorrect about it. It just wasn’t right.

I sat with that for most of a day before I let myself actually admit what fixing it would mean, which was taking the whole posture apart and rebuilding from the armature up, a solid three or four extra weeks on a piece I’d already quoted a timeline for. Every practical instinct said finish it as is, ship it, nobody but me would ever know the difference. I didn’t do that. I called the client, explained I wasn’t happy with it and needed more time, and took it apart that same afternoon before I could talk myself out of it.

It came back the second time reading exactly the way it was supposed to, relaxed, watching something in the distance instead of about to bolt, and the client never knew there’d been a first version at all. I think about that piece more than almost anything else I’ve built, not because the final result was extraordinary, it wasn’t, it was just correct, but because of how close I came to shipping the wrong one simply because the wrong one was already done. I’ve gotten better since at catching that earlier, at forcing the fresh-eyes look before three weeks in instead of after. There’s always those little mistakes that stuff up the timeline along the way though, no matter how careful I get. Not perfect at it. Better.