How to Forge a Human Skull - Forging Techniques for Beginners

hi there I'm back I am working on a project with a skull and cross motif skulls and crosses in today's video we'll be forming the skull which is probably by far the coolest portion of this whole project so I'll be starting with a piece of 3/4 inch square bar there's mild steel so let's begin first step is putting that inch over the outside edge of the Apple and I want to bring that down on a 90 whoops once I've got it down on a 90 I want to curl it back on itself at the same time I'm rounding it out trying to form the back of the skull here okay so now that I've got it in two dimensions there now it's time to start rounding out the edges okay so that is step one there and you can see I've rounded that over I've got a nice very recognizable shape of the back of a skull there so that all rounded out and everything is ready to go so now we're able to move on to our next step which is going to be dropping in the cheese alright so step two is to get it into the spring folder here and right at the base of the cranium there's where I want to drop in the chief about should be deep enough now I'm just gonna bring down below so that's the cheeks in there that's brought that down there giving me shape this will become the jaw part here and the face will be happening like right in there I'll be pushing the eyes out so that is our starting shape I just want to knock the corners off what would be the top of the jaw and now I just want to take a final look at the skull itself there I'm trying to put a bit of a center crown on there and we are ready to go to the vice so now the facial features are going to start happening so we switch everything's gonna happen in device now holding it there and then with various punches I will start popping in the facial features so these are the tools that I'll be using I think this should do the whole process here a dull center punch a really dull center punch a sharp hot chisel a dull small hot chisel and then this is my sculpting tool I don't really have a name for it but I can push flat areas in and control that with the radius so these are the tools I'm using let's get started so I get this nested in the vise here back of the skull against the top of the vise and I'm gonna start with the eyes and they start close together I'm gonna get them seated nice and centered and symmetrical to each other and once I've got them started I can start sinking them in as I start sinking them in I push them out and down [Music] pretty much lost my heat there now that it's getting cooler Tamara might be able to get a little bit better focus on what's going on in here but you can see I started out with the eyes as just little center punch dots and then I'm pushing them out and squaring them off for lack of a better term I'm pushing up those two edges out and up gonna square that off so that I've got most of the depth in there for the eyeballs now orbital sockets so I'm gonna get it hot again push up the nose and then do some more shaping on the eyes taking the center punch and I'm going to do the nose now so I'm going to start low going kind of straight in just to start and then very quickly I start slanting it pushing upwards so started coming in at a 90 and then end up pretty much at a forty-five I'm just shoving that up to get that shape the bridge of the nose and now I'm just going to drop those walls in a little bit [Music] okay that's the nose let's take a look at this dusty old skull here this is my little anatomical reference that I use I've got the bridge of the nose form there I've got the eyes pushed in there what I need to do now is drop back the cheeks and push them up I've got quite a bit of height in the head as here as well so I want to push this whole these cheeks up and back that'll be our next eat all right so now I'm actually just coming with a hot chisel to start just to establish where I want to push up the cheeks that I moved to my flat tool I wanna push up but I also want to push back change of plane for the cheeks always find it funny how the expression on these things change as do this got very sad eyes on the skull now he seems a little concerned with what's going on but we can change that out [Music] doing a skull o2 3/4 like this I tend to keep the detail pretty crude you can you can capture the idea of what a skull is up without getting too anatomically specific or crazy on something like this when I work on bigger stuff like I've got some skulls that my cameraman will be showing you probably right now out of inch and a half square which is so double double the size of this deal which is quadruple the volume which is a lot exponentially more material to work with so where I can work on a skull like this on and make a skull Oh to 3/4 in about 10 minutes 15 minutes at most when I'm working with inch and a half it's taking me about two hours of hard work to get a skull up because there's so much more volume so much more to move but I can get a lot more detail so you can see the difference in detail back on the eye this time trying to work on the shape [Music] gonna put a hint of growl in there something you might be surprised to know that skulls don't actually have expressions in their anatomically correct form but a lot of the motifs that you'll see you put the angry eyes on the skull and that tends to be by putting the brows on there I always tend to put it into that give it that little bit up badassery if you will what people tend to want when they're looking at a skull I got a really high top of the skull on this one it's almost got that as tech feel where they used to take their babies heads and squash them out it's a little bit long in there the thing with skulls is you got to do that a lot of them to kind of figure out what your proportions are because where you start a certain thing it's going to shove the steel around that bit of volume and you have to kind of train yourself as to where you need to be at any stage in the process to end up with the right proportion so it just takes a little bit of experience to do that and I don't do this enough to always nail it although I've done a lot of skulls over the years right down in the black heat range so probably like 800 degrees Fahrenheit at this point may be lower than that like pretty much is working cold right now you can put in some of the detail that way all right that is not bad I don't think I'm gonna fuss with it too much more let's move down and get the actual teeth in there and that will finish off this skull [Music] alright time for a little dental work once again I'm gonna come in out of 90 a little lower than where I want to end up [Music] I'm gonna start my I'm going to push up and actually round it towards the back of the cheek there the zygomatic arch which I'm not actually putting in that's the detail on the side there that I won't do on something this small and rudimentary okay so we've got doesn't that define now I'm going to come in with my smaller chisel here and start in the center and just kind of punish her style I just want to put some vertical lines in there to establish the teeth and this is something you can spend some time on and you can actually sculpt the top of the teeth and put their little line the arch in top of there and the double groove of the opposite groove there push that down to make the teeth kind of pronounced you can spend quite a bit of time on there and get some really cool detail in this case because I'm just trying to sell this at a glance you know just the skull thing I think I can just stay with the very simple Punisher style teeth on there I think most of you will know what I mean when I say Punisher and it's not coming to scale off here and see how we're doing pretty good maybe I'll just kind of video defying the canines there a little bit okay we'll just leave it at that certainly not anatomically correct compared to a real skull but you still get the idea there that is definitely small so there we have it skull forging the skull can be used this motif can be used for a number of things and really lends itself well to some really cool and treatments for a bar you can do hundreds of different things with this skull once you know how to make it I'm going to be doing this golden crosses smooth motif for a project that you'll see in a following video so join us in our next video where I'll be for me in the crosses and then a following video we'll be putting the whole thing together and make it something pretty cool so hope you join us for that in the meantime if you haven't subscribed please subscribe to our Channel comments below all that stuff thumbs up yeah or thumbs down winter yeah hope to see you next time back out [Music]

Channel: Thak Ironworks

Views: 66,944

Keywords: steel skull, metal skull, forging skull, blacksmith techniques, artist blacksmith, how to forge a skull, blacksmithing lessons, forging techniques, handmade metal skull, forging a skull, forged skull, blacksmithing for beginners, blacksmith made, decorative iron work, beginner blacksmith techniques, forging techniques for beginners, basic blacksmithing techniques, basic blacksmithing projects, cool blacksmithing projects, skull, forge, blacksmith, thak, hand forged skull

Id: Q7BWWkd5WsM

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 30 2019