Skull study

Back to the basics

^2021-08-10

Background
The human face. What a complex wonder. How many billions of humans are there at the moment? 7.9 and we all look different!
Capturing this magic in clay proves to be very difficult for a beginner art explorer like me. I drew "faces" for many weeks trying to learn proportions. A potato shape with some lines inside is much faster with a plastic stick on a drawing board then conditioning and shaping clay as a first stage learning process. When I was fairly confident that my lines represented a human face closely enough I got on with chopping up and mushing this gorgeous brick of gray material called Super Sculpey Firm.
The first few dozens of clay "heads" had to be re purposed as none of them looked like anything I wanted to keep. Then slowly more pleasing forms appeared under my fingers. I finished a couple of figurines then tried different reliefs thinking "Okay, I can get back to faces any time, now that I have learnt the basics. How naive I was! About a month into reliefs I've decided that it wasn't for me and "real" 3D sculptures were more exciting and wanted to do the next figurine just to find out that I didn't quite forget the "rules" or rather guidelines to of a human face but I wasn't able to give form in clay to what was in my head.
Being an engineer by trade the thought occured to me that maybe if I knew more about the underlying the structure, ie the skull I could remember better the wrapping outside. The most appealing reference was the Anatomy 3D Atlas from Catfish Animation Studios. I was rather happy with the end result. Since this study creating a basic human face with good proportions seem just a little easier. Therefore I call this study a great success!

Materials used
* Monster clay

Lesson(s) learnt
* Wash your hands before sculpting
^{Well, this should really be obvious. However I cannot resist giving a fuss to our dogs when they come in to say hello. After a few minutes of stroking doggies that have been playing outside in the garden leaves me so absent minded that I just get on with whatever I was doing. The video shows the unsightly results. Since this piece will be cast and it's a super valuable lesson I don't mind it much.}


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