A Finished Life Sculpture

I have finally sat down and finished my life sculpture today. I had a quick look over the face and cleaned it up, then I finished the hair. For the hair I finished rolling up long pieces of clay and placing them on the head to create the correct parting. I used a fine haired paint brush to create the smooth curvatures of the hair.

My friend who modeled for me wears similar glasses to me so to get a better likeness I took these photographs. I really enjoyed this short course in life sculpture and I plan on working more with clay in the future. For my next sculpture I was thinking of making a 3D version of my medusa illustration.

Life Sculpting Week 5

When we arrived this week we were told that we now had an extra week to complete our sculptures. Which was a blessing because I never would have finished in time.

This is before I added the lower lids on the eyes. It makes it look like she has her eyes closed and is really happy.

And now she is winking or has something in her eye.

I started to add the hair roughly so that I could gain some perspective on the facial structure and features. The eyes may need to be done again as I am still not happy with them. Next week I am going to focus on  doing the details and finishing the hair.

Week 4 Life Sculpting

This Week I didn’t feel like I had accomplished much in the way of adding features or hair, instead I went over all the features I had already sculpted and altered them untill I felt they were correct. I redid the eyes countless times however I still don’t think they are right after this session. I added more to the bone structure of the face giving the head more height.

Life Sculpting Week 3

This week was a bit of a blur for me as I was under the weather. However I managed to get some more detail added to the features and I applied some ears.

It’s funny how, during the process of sculpting, your work and start to look like something you would dig up in a tomb. I had a lot of trouble with the eyes this week. I must have scooped them out and re-molded them a dozen times.

Looking at this image now I can see that I have made the ears slightly too big. It’s always good to step back from your work from time to time to spot the mistakes you may not be seeing close up. She now has a fuller face, a reshaped nose and I am going to work on the eyes again next week.

Uncanny! What a difference a pair of glasses make

When I put the glasses on the sculpture I realised something had been bugging me about the features. Something just didn’t seem right. The fact is Vicky and I both wear glasses and to sculpt our heads without them made the sculpture look unfamiliar, as we are not used to seeing each other without glasses.

This is how far Vix has got so far. She has got my chubby cheeks down to a ‘T’. I look forward to having hair though.

Life Sculpting Week 2

After making sure the basic shape of the skull was correct we could start on the facial features. We measured our own heads using calipers and then transfered these measurements to our clay sculpture to make sure that everything is the right proportion and in the correct place.

Life sculpting week 1

My friend and I decided we would attend a short course at our university why we were still studying there. We chose to do a 5 week course in life sculpting as working with clay is fantastic, relaxing and  fulfilling. The good thing about this particular course was that instead of sculpting from a life model we got to choose are own models. We chose to model for each other being the clever cloggs that we are. that way we could always look over the table if we need to look at each other at different angles. we also had more opportunities to take photos of each other to use as reference. At the end of the 5 weeks we are going to swap over our sculptures of each other.

This is my beautiful model photographed just after our first lesson. As you can see we were very happy with our choice of course.

The first lesson was mostly about creating a frame to start molding the the basic shape of the head. We started by creating a metal cage on the end of the wooden base, filled with crumpled paper and secured with masking tape. Then you just start applying the clay a bit at a time as firmly to the structure as possible. The clay we are using is air drying clay which means you don’t need to pop it in the kiln when your done.