Step by Step process of sculpting a bust

[Music] hi i'm marina walsh i'm here to teach you how to do a basic portrait but to first work out how to do the inner structure and how to make it so that it's easy to remove this sculpture from this armature and i also want to show you the basic proportions of a generic head for now here are the tools of the trade these are the tools you'll be needing i have here some old surf form blades they've got a lovely strong serrated edge you can also use a serrated knife if you can't find beautiful serrated kidneys this is a soft kidney for smoothing in between this is for shaping and these are for measuring the width and the distances between the features of the head some hollowing tools some shaping tools you'll always have your favorite and some some kebab sticks measuring tape and importantly also some cutters for cutting your clay here i've just got some gut with some nuts at the end because i'm always losing mine so i'm always having to remake them so not too much you can find a lot of these things in your kitchen if you are stuck and can't find these tools and wonderful tools to be found online but this is the essential i have here a pretty sturdy armature which i've had welded and it's for teaching purposes therefore it's very strong at home you could easily do a broomstick or a thick dial stick this one is 2.5 centimeters wide you could go slightly wider i would in fact go for a three centimeter wide dial stick which you would drill into a piece of wood a nice sturdy thick piece of wood you might have to laminate a few pieces together to get a nice thick piece um this is the simplest structure which makes it easy for us to remove the sculpture afterwards here i have 40 centimeters of stick this is going to allow us a head of about 25 centimeters and there's enough room for a neck and a bit of shoulder if we want i have here some shapes that i've made these are what i can call ovoids this is a quarter ovoid um this here is a half an oil weight or half a rugby ball and then i have two more shapes here these ones are going to go down here just to fill in the neck areas we're trying to fill in the space inside the skull and inside the head so that the clay doesn't get too heavy and we don't have to use too much clay i have here some pieces of tin foil and i'm going to join these two pieces together which i've just crunched out of paper ready packing paper and the easiest way to join these students together and so you'll stick with a nice piece of tinfoil like so am i going to take another piece just to make it nice and strong this here is to protect to create some construction and some shape to your neck area as well which becomes a guide if this is the front of your face then the longer piece will go off the back and this will be your shorter piece which is basically your chest coming out um right nice and tight this will give us the basic inner shape of your portrait allowing for more clay on this side to allow for the angle of the neck which comes from the back without the stick getting in the way and a little bit of chest we haven't allowed for shoulders just yet because i'm just i'm going to leave that out for now i've covered the temple structure with some flag wrap preferably non-perforated cloud wrap otherwise it's going to keep tearing as you wrap it um this is just to stop the clay from sticking to the tin foil when we're hollowing out i'm now going to start adding some clay i have some basic tools here one is for cutting um the clay it's it's fish gut with just two nuts at the end and very importantly i have some kebab sticks which are going to be my guide and my measuring help some beautiful shaping tools some hollowing tools and i have a piece of serrated um surface which i will use for evening after clay um i'm just going to start by adding the clay fairly regularly i'll start at the top and work my way down i add little pieces like this that um uh sits tightly onto the clay and also i always add from the middle out to avoid air bubbles and i will cover the whole structure like this using pieces of clay roughly that size manageable pieces that will stick to the whole structure all the way around the plastic also helps the clay to stick to to the armature do it evenly otherwise your piece gets unbalanced and just keep the clay nice and rough and un unsmooth just keep it open as you're going to be adding quite a lot more clay once i've attached a layer of clay i take this rough surfa blade and i just even out the clay like this into a nice even shape this still allows a nice texture for adding more clay [Music] and whilst giving it a really nice even look i have now added a good two inches of clay to that armature and fairly quickly as well even though the clay is rather weight i'm not too worried because um we've got the naked structure and support um and now i'm just evening this out again with my rough silver blade i have given the pose the head a slightly up lifted pose i'm looking up is a bit more positive it all helps with the mood one has towards the sculpture i have added some chest over here taken it back towards the notch where our shoulder blades come in and i've allowed for a little bit of back and right now because i have the square i can see exactly that my my rod is right in the middle of the sculpture i am going to try and create a fairly square head and i'm going to add a bit more clay over here because the width and the height and the width of the skull are almost the same always adding from the middle afterwards again we can check although i don't want to make too many holes in the clay that i would at the moment the the clay is a bit thin on the side but i'm still going to be adding quite a bit on the sides but down here in the front it's quite deep the chin is nice and deep because i added quite a bit of clay there so we are going to add some more forage and a lot more to the sides so therefore i'm quite happy with what we've got right now it is roughly um a slightly bigger than uh life size we want it to be bigger than life size because uh the clay shrinks quite a lot in the in the kiln so it can shrink up to 20 percent but we work around 10 or 15 one time i'm fairly happy with the shape of my head i will keep on changing it but where the rod sits is kind of where the middle of the head is right now i'm going to draw a line to indicate that from both sides then i'm going to put one kebab stick like this and another kind of egg to my chin area and i'm going to guess the halfway mark it's kind of where our eyes are going to sit and just above that is our brow our um this area just above the nose the bridge of our nose which is going to be almost the lowest or most innermost point of the skull then i'm going to draw a line through the middle here at the halfway mark of my head and i'm going to just make sure that i have balanced this skull on either side um once we've got the volume of our head and now i want to start finding out where to place things where to place the nose the eyes the ears first i'm going to divide the face horizontally and i'm going to start with a hairline the hairline here and from the hairline i will divide the face in three equal measures one is where we've established the bridge of our nose that distance is roughly the same distance as the length of our nose and from our nose to our chin it's roughly the same length again so we'll keep those lines in place there we go then actually i need to take this off then i just want to introduce two planes the your cheekbone your cheekbone um comes around your face like this from your ear and then makes a b line for your nose it this is the flattest part of your face and we want to just introduce two planes like this where the angle of the cheekbone shifts around the base like this this help us to see the vertical divisions um here we divide the face into five equal parts one into five sections this is your nose section the eyes which are going to be as wide as there's always one eye between an eye and then these are your artifice one two three four five right so this is where your nose is this is where your eyes are going to be now where this was lined with the bridge so your eye is going to sit below that and mouth the lowest part of your mouth is going to sit midway between the chin and the bottom of the nose so the whole mouth sits above that area right now we want to establish where the ears are going to go roughly from the eyebrow across and from the bottom of the nose across fairly horizontally although remember this is at a slight slant so we're going at right angles to the angle of the face this is where your jawline is going to come we haven't really sculpted it yet but we know that when we unblock our ears our draw is connected to the ear and to the ear hole which sits roughly here and the ear sits over here at an angle to the jaw same this side a little bit higher that's the brow and the nose angle here take it away a little bit and this is where your ear is going to sit in your hole over there this is important to know because this is how we establish where our cheek bone is the cheekbone is the highest point in the face if you feel if you literally take your fingers and feel along your cheekbone you'll establish that this is the highest point of your face about here and your cheekbone comes in from here and goes across there more like that and from here like that you can literally sit and feel your own face and what you'll see is that it goes straight to the nose from here to the side let's just work on the side right then we also need to establish the highest point of our skull which is about here these are very important clips or points in our face in my head very important little landmarks right at this point i want to do a few crosstics on measurements that i want this head to have i've done i've used the set of calipers like this and i've gone to measure my son's head in this case and i've measured the width of his widest part of his head the widest part of his cheekbone and the widest part of his jawline then from the nose to the chin from the width of his mouth which should almost line up with the distance between the two pupils here then i have also measured his whole head and then on a profile i've measured his um although this didn't fit right into the drawing i measured the full width of his head i measured from the tip of his nose to his ear hole from the tip of his nose to his chin and his jawline and then what's interesting is the depth of his eye now we're not seeing the whole eye here and but this bridge is remarkably deep these measurements are made with the calipers i am going to take the actual centimeter measurement and increase my measurements by 10 to allow for shrinkage having established these measurements i want to just emphasize a softer kidney um the temple again what i also forgot to mention was that the the artifice also are about the width of an eye so we want to keep that right and taking our cheekbone as a guide just hollow out here a little bit not using our high point here and we want to take a little bit down underneath the cheekbone with the draw hangs here and i haven't drawn this in so coming here to the ear and from here so bringing in this temple here i'm always amazed at how how big the temple area is on the face this now gives us the planes just emphasizes the planes and gives this head a little bit of an age slightly older looking and shapes the draw a little bit more accurately so i have taken some measurements as i said off um my son's head i actually want to sculpt my father but uh he is slightly past so i'm going to so i've taken my son's measurements they are also measurements of an average face and i want to just increase these measurements um by about 10 to 15 i'm just taking a guess here about that and make sure that i have those heights over there that's sorry that's the cheaper and a bit lower um the height of the the width of the head taken away but pushing that measurement a little bit further back behind the temple and the draw add a bit of width a little bit more this is just a laugh or shrinkage i don't like a head that is smaller than life it can look a little bit shrunken after the firing rather go bigger and allow it to shrink two life size go much much bigger or much smaller at least 20 larger than life at this stage right just just cross-checking those measurements um a whole head here roughly right and um yeah we'll get to the eyes and the mouth a little later from a profile point of view this is the measurement from the ear to the nose well we haven't got the nose yet so we can't tell then um that was about the width of the head and a bit more so we've got some room to add here this is without hair don't forget you've always got to sculpt your skull before you add hair you've got to have your skull in place and before you add your hair which lies on top of the skull anyway so these other measurements are a bit premature i now want to show you um with my tool what happens here with the eye socket i also want to just correct something i did earlier this measurement where the bridge of the noses that's not where the third lies the third is from the the um hairline to the brow brow line rather then the bra to the nose and then the nose to the chin okay just a small small correction here this is our brow and now i want to show you something interesting it's totally amazing how we are designed our eye sits in what looks a little bit like a ray-ban shape i like to take the clay and actually squash it out like this but it also goes back it goes into where our outer fifth was and it goes out here and that gives us our peripheral vision and this goes a bit narrower here also so that our eyesight can cross over so that's fascinating i also find it amazing how protected the eye is take a little bit out with your scoop and then squeeze a little bit of it into the this bone here but into take it back take it back as a wedge into the artifice connect your bridge and go quite deep i did take a measurement here of the depth of the bridge to the eye and that's rather deep so we can go quite deep here to where the eye is although i think i'll build it out a little bit but that's quite an amazing distance don't underestimate it especially um in in my family since i am looking at my son we have very deep set eyes right i've pushed these eye sockets right back um and i've created two balls oops i've lost my one right here i've created two eyeballs roughly two centimeters in diameter diameter and i've pushed this eye socket right back almost to my plastic right right through which is basically anatomically quite correct like but the core of the sculpture might be the brains of the skull to allow this ball to fit right in there right i want this distance remember i measured that distance and i i want it in there so this form is going to sit right deep this might be a little bit deep for for other people but for this portrait um i want to go fairly deep this ball is a little bit too big and make it a bit smaller i've also let it dry out a little bit it's a little harder than the other clay which allows it not to get so distorted with all the work around the eye right so now very important to make sure that this measurement between the eyes remember i've made this head a little bit bigger so i'm going to allow for about a few more inches centimeters millimeters wherever i sit so don't hesitate to take it out make the cavity a little bit bigger and push it back in just you don't want eyes that are too narrow too close together um remember it's about an eye between and i still think this one's too big so right there now the next thing is i'm going to flatten i'm going to actually take away quite a bit uh because there's a slight angle from the brow to the bottom bone i want to take the flatness a bit not too much and the eye the eye sits at an angle like this in the head this is very important to note it doesn't sit flat it sits at an angle like this so the bottom of the lid is behind the top lid and and this is your flat part of the face i'm just going to take a little bit away here a little bit of clear way here to flatten the face here a bit and so that the eye can sit correctly in the face check your bra check your distance from the cornea to the bridge of the nose very important to check that and i also look from above very very good to constantly look from above and from below very very very helpful to see that you've balanced your face you can see i need a bit more there very very useful perspectives right the difficult part is creating a likeness i think now that we know roughly where everything goes it's time to just have a good look at our reference i've managed to pull for some photographs of my dad who was born in 1921 out of a photo album and these pictures are tiny as that is the way photographs were taken in those days so if i wasn't um in lockdown because today is the 4th of april 2020 i would probably go down the road and have these photocopied and enlarged to a bigger scale in the meantime i'm just going to try and find as many photographs of him photograph them put them on my computer screen and just have a good look at the head shape before i continue with any features and just try and work in general more and then i'll carry on with nose and ears and mouth i've now added a lot of clay to the back here which makes this head a better proport a better shape and i've also added quite a bit of volume to the neck as we've kind of left it behind with all the sculpting of the head i'm just bringing it into proportion to the head a little bit and i want to start adding the nose before i even do the eyes i'm going to take quite a big wedge a piece of clay and create a weight shape this is where the nose bone sits and we must bear that in mind to feel where it actually sits and then to cut this and add this for the face we roughly know where to go up to now of course i have to look very carefully at the features of my father's nose in between these demonstrations i'm constantly evening out the face checking for balance checking that everything is equal on both sides and i want to just place the ears now all is stand off from the face and it's a good indication when you take a photograph of somebody that you see both ears so you must always photograph the person you want to sculpt from a distance of three meters and if you see both ears then you know you're you're far enough so many people reference the wrong images um of their cell phone having taken a selfie they too close up and and the camera distorts the face and we end up with this fisher this fish eye kind of face with a big face and and disappearing ears here are uh again indicators from the brow from the tip of the nose where the where the ear sits in line with the jawline here this is purely these are two little orange wedges i've made they are equal i'm checking their size against one another as if you were taking a notchier part really and uh i put one on the side to scratch a little bit wet it perhaps if it's dry and just attach it over here and on the side again the jawline the brow line nose line just checking where my ear is here also just always double checking from above and very importantly from below every now and then to check that you are in the right place here so a little bit lower touching that wedge that's just the wedge it's just what's behind the ear making sure we're in the right place i seem to be out here like so remember we said that um the mouth the bottom of the mouth sits halfway between the tip of the nose and the chin so our mouth here i'm going to sit roughly here the most important thing to remember about the mouth is that it sits and hugs the teeth and therefore it is a very very strong horseshoe shape that you get here if you don't do that you'll get a very old looking person who has no teeth it's very important to create this wedge over here where the mouth hugs the teeth and then falls back into the cheeks my father has quite a strong chin i'm just going to add a little chin here just to give it some more shape here right again i'm going to establish my midline and for now i'm just going to indicate an upper lip with a sausage push it up a bit you can see i'm wedging it up blending it with the inside of the nose where it goes to i'm adding the bottom lip thin sausage with two little points like this quite a thin lip but i'm not really getting like this yet just getting the positioning right right now i'm going to go back to the eyes before i establish exactly where and how the mouth lines up with the eyes going back to the eyes i've actually taken these eyeballs out freshened them up rolled them again putting them back in to their sockets this one seems a little bit big and placing them in here i'm now going to fit them into this socket with a thin sausage which i place in all the way around that's to avoid any big air bubbles that might occur in the clay without damaging the roundness as i said my father's eyes are rather deep-set uh therefore i've left them quite a high brow here i haven't even added any brow yet which is quite normal for men men have males have have a higher more prominent brow here generally and i haven't even added that yet again constantly checking that once we have the lid in it's going to read as one eye between the eyes you can see that here one eye one whole eye between the eyes then i create some very thin i make a little sausage and then with very soft clay i create a thin lid in this case the lids are very very thin on my father and i look very very carefully at the the shape of his eyes but in general as a rule the curve from the tear duct up is steeper and then curves down and another thing to remember is that the tear duct sits lower than the uh outer tip of the eye so this is generally a bit lower so it curves up and then softens over there remember and that even the curve of the eye is slightly more as if it was sitting deeper in the brow eye sitting here so that would be its curve if you're wondering what the background scratching noises it's my parrot who's come to visit she's climbed up here all the way from outside to come and check me out we also are filming here in johannesburg where we have hardy does that make a loud squawking noise we always joke that they're afraid of heights that's why they scream now for the lower lid same again or sausage leaving a little bit of a curl here for the tear duct little gap there and very carefully placing this around the eye it's always very hard to get both eyes equal remembering that this part the tear duct part is is lower than this part the outer edge of the eye right my parrot is starting to make some commentary i now want to add a little pocket here oh yeah and the same here quite a heavy bridge on the new eyes here quite a heavy bra a strong weird shape which i want to include here and a bit more bra over the whole area here there we go once we have a basic shape for our eyes i'm going to just show you one way of creating some life in these eyes and i'm just going to do it very subtly for now as we are not sure yet of which way we want this eye to look so there are many ways of representing the eye the the pupils it's often touching top and bottom in the case of my bag that's the case now of course we can we can play around with the eye having it having it look into the distance which makes it more contemplative you can have them staring straight at you but thinking of something else you can play around it all depends very much also on on the expression of the mouth how much of a smile you're bringing in because obviously that that flattens this bottom lid and and crinkles up the the laughter lines here so so the eye is very very dependent on what happens with the mouth so for now i just want to put a bit of a bit of life into this eye um and the general rule is here we're not sticking to the anatomy of the eye anymore we are now coloring and drawing with light and shadow so we are impressing the the iris and bringing a bit of shadow into that eye i'm actually going to take out a little bit of clay it's a blue eye it's less deep a dark brown eye you would go deeper my dad had blue eyes so i'm sticking to quite a shallow shadow recess right now and then i roughen it up a bit and we always have a little bit of light catching in our eyes so right now that looks a bit big but it's just there to give a little bit of expression to this eye whilst we work carry on working and then a slightly darker hole for the actual pupil that's a very rigid steering eye for now but we'll we'll play around there are many many ways of of doing this this is generally my approach the clay is rather wet here and therefore i'm also not going to get too fussed about the detail right now i needed to harden a little bit i've done this eye a little more roughly to quote giacometti he he said the less the eye looks like a biological eye the more you've captured the spirit what he meant was that if you put a shell in there and it looks like an eye use the shell don't it's about capturing something you want to capture a spirit but for now of course we want to vaguely stick to what we're doing here in this sweet photograph of my father mother at their wedding i found a profile and discovered that his forehead is is a bit more pronounced so i'm going to work on that and then i'm going to work on the nose i'm going to have to reference a few more photographs just to get the exact shape of the smurfs but for now i'm happy i don't think it's wise to get too involved in any area of the face at this stage try and work generally otherwise you get so involved and then only to find that you've you've made a mistake or it's in the wrong place even though we've now pretty much certain about where everything is placed it still can change from the nose comes the upper lip so before i do and shape the nostrils very nicely i tend to integrate the upper lip into the nostrils like this to make sure that there's a flow of the profile it really is a magic that happens when you start photo full um doing portraiture especially somebody you know and someone in the family you start seeing all kinds of things about yourself about your children and it becomes a very spiritual process since i am building a bit of the back of the head i've decided to also bring in an indication of the hair i'm applying the hair as if i were a hairdresser as if i were brushing through the hair so i'm applying a piece of clay and then actually literally brushing it back as if i was brushing his own hair he has a distinct path on this side and most of us have what a crown in our hair you know where our hair comes from and where it splits into all the different directions naturally it also grows all over the place but there's always a crown i'm guessing it's wrong about there on my dad's head so i have here another angle of him and i'm going to literally just try and draw out his outline because i need to make sure that when i bring in this ear it's out far enough i have already added more but i still think it needs to come out more it's very very important that when we look at the front of the face the ear in this case is quite protruding so just just integrating brushing seeing where the hair has come from parting it a little bit i can still work on the on the shape of the the head here yes it's parting it's important to note at this stage that this generally is more angled i think i've got an action right too far obviously because he's looking up this angle isn't as as far back as if he was if the angle was straight so don't be fooled by the fact that he's looking up so this almost becomes more straight more perpendicular to your uh to your base so i have just adjusted and pushed this nose back a bit but i don't want to lose the whole nose i want to lose the depth of that nose and the size of it so i am pushing this back a little bit and slowly slowly working my way towards the mouth which is crucial the math will determine the expression and again influence the eyes and the fullness of the cheeks coming to the mouth again just check your your vertical balance there are a lot of muscles around the mouth there's a whole almost circle of muscles that go around the mouth there are 300 muscles they say there are also over a million facial expressions sometimes i feel like i'm going through all of them before i get to what i want i want to create that little little angels touch is what they call it remembering that the outer edge of your mouth generally lines up with the pupil of your eye you can draw a little line there and this one here this is if you've got a neutral expression to your mouth now in this mouth it's quite a thin mouth i can't really demonstrate the fullness but but each all mouths have little nodules or lips and don't be full the the lip is very much part of the face it's not as it's not an add-on i don't like adding on i'd rather add on the whole volume and push away and cut away then add on a mouth the lips are simply a different color and a different texture skin texture they are not separate from the face i have a little trick in making my ears and it's based on a little story i heard when my daughter was at convent school the the nuns used to say to them that the inner ear was a bit of the shape of a fetus and if you look it really is quite true so what i do in order to create an ear quite quickly i create what looks a bit like a fetus or a comma and that's the inside of the ear not the outside don't make it too thick although you can have quite a lot of volume and if you're worried about creating equal sized ears you can create two of these one for each ear obviously it would need to be the opposite so it would create a little heart with an inner heart inside um you then attach this quite securely and blend it in remembering that this is where your ear hole sits your drawer comes in here splits and your holes in your hole sits there today is monday and i've got a lot of noise coming from the kitchen and then i create another piece of clay i take another piece of soft clay and i make a long sausage like this it's a bit of a taper on the end a little taper here and i attach it and this makes it creates the outer lobe the outer lobe of the ear this part here so that's quite thin and i curl it around the inner ear keeping it quite thin and then breaking off the wrist and and tapering it in like this so you've got your inner ear you've got your outer lobe and you have to treat your ear very much like its own little portrait as well each person's ear is completely different and both ears are not the same on one person so you have to again look very very carefully at that but this is a quick way of creating the impression of an ear as you can see it's standing out from the head nicely and it's a little messy but that's the general idea just to give yourself uh a more human look as well to start getting a proper profile on this head you then take off your wedge you dig into your wedge take that clay and add it here there's a little bone behind your ear and you can start feeling how the shape of your head is at the back and you can do the way a little bit more and and then it's a case of really really looking and shaping that yeah some people have a very very protruding an ear this almost stands out further than the outer edge of the ear in order to integrate the the face and the head and the jaw with the neck you have to know a little bit of anatomy and and how the muscles work around the neck i've built the neck up a little bit to come in line with the width of the head and neck is almost as wide as as the jawline i then take a very generous piece of clay like this and make a muscle it's the sternocleidomastoid muscle which is a huge muscle when you look at people when you watch tv next have a look at their necks the most expressive muscle on the body i then attach it to the skull and flatten it and bring it round to where it attaches to the clavicle and forms a suprasternal notch the rest of the clothing gets blended in and you'll find there's a muscle here that attaches the gauge to the collarbone or clavicle and you can even bring in the bone here i might have gone a bit lower here i think i shall bring this up a little bit push this all up but instantly you have quite a nice shape to your neck the two muscles come together here forming a triangle attaching to the back of the head and instantly giving the neck some shape and giving us something to work with here and integrating the jawline i've created an adam's apple my dad had quite a pronounced one and it's lovely to have this beautiful notch here i then work on the back muscles and neck muscles again these are broad muscles that attach to the there are many many layers of muscles underneath us of course but we are only looking at the very surface muscles as you can see now the neck and the head are more integrated working through the camera is quite a good exercise it takes you a step back i had to do a lot of work on the forehead to get this whole face into proportion it was much too big in proportion to the forehead and i've added a lot for the hair it's hard to know when to stop because sometimes you capture something with the rough texture that you lose when smoothing although the sculpture isn't completely finished i'm just going to demonstrate um where we cut and how we hollow out because i do want to place them now which will also help me finalize everything the finish and everything so it's hard enough definitely hard enough to hello there are a few soft bits here on the hair that i added today but generally it must be so firm that you know it takes a lot of pressure to indent the clay and you will only really achieve that by leaving it out a little bit to dry don't be afraid at this stage if you're in a cool dark place to with no draft to leave it open for a while it also helps you to stop changing things to let things settle and and um because there comes a point when sometimes you don't even know how to stop or where to stop so there comes a point when it is hard and it gets harder and harder to work on and so you you start finding your piece with the piece i'm going to put three markers either side because i'm going to be cutting open here this is my register it's surprisingly necessary you'll think that you will know how to put this piece back but often there's a bit of distortion this piece here sometimes becomes so obscure you don't know which way around to put it it just helps you i've got a stronger gut a thicker gut because this clay is rather hard [Music] do you have somebody on standby if you don't know how to do this to catch the piece but i know this piece won't work um my goodness this piece is hard okay yeah i have gone through which means i can lift this a little bit more grip with the plastic i want you to store this piece just go through here strange reason there we go it was a bit more tricky than normal so that piece you then put on a on a cushion and wait for it to be hollowed and now you take your tool your hollowing tools and you dig around the score until you free it up leaving a very nice edge for it to be rejoined a nice one inch edge that doesn't mean that the whole piece is one inch thick it just means i've got a good solid edge but i actually try and make the walls a little bit less almost like a centimeter i seem to be too thick all round i should go a little bit thinner on the inside but my edge must stay nice and strong for the two pieces to marry afterwards once i've hollowed satisfactorily as you can see i've hollowed it thinner than the actual edge where i'm going to join the same here i've gone into the nose into the cheekbones i followed the contours but i have left the neck area quite thick still because i know i can come in from underneath and i want to just get this bit over and done with the clay is still quite thin and quite soft so i don't want any more distortion than i have to i'm not going to scratch very deep very very rough although i put the um hollowing the the removal of it off the plinth on time lapse i must say that this method with the the tinfoil really works well it's left me with quite a nice cavity and much less work on the hollowing side both sides i then take wet slip which is basically clay wet wet with water mixed with a lot more water [Music] that you then put on in this case i think it's fine to just do it on one side here is where the registration marks come in there's a bit more distortion than i like because i've done this a little bit on the student side now very important is to stitch it together nice deep deep stitches all the way around so that's why it's good to do this before you've completely finished the hair because you do mix it up again a bit and then take a sausage of clay and i press it in from one end to the other do you give yourself enough time to do all of this in one go don't interrupt this process once you've started the halloween process finish it to avoid as much distortion as possible as little distortion as possible now you can adjust the angle of your head you can place it you can finalize the finish the angle and do all the finishing touches and remembering that you forgot to hollow the neck but the neck needs to be quite sturdy now to hold the weight of the head because there's no more support inside careful not to let it fall once you've hollowed the sculpture and the neck it's a great time to double check the sculpture from below but basically i have scratched the the bottom here and added a fresh piece of clay to close off the bottom lots of cross hatching and a nice fresh piece of clay here because now i'm going to do my final placement of my head so that once i fire it and it's hard it can go and be mounted correctly and there you go quite a few more hours we'll put in here a lot of looking at other photographs other angles um cleaning the surface with a stiff brush to get rid of all the crumbs and don't be afraid to put some drama into the sculpture you know nice deep lines a bit of contrast that's what helps and makes it stand out all these little bumps all these little textures add to the life of the sculpture i'm fairly happy i feel it looks like my dad see a little bit of my brother's mouth there a lot of people said looks like me yeah [Music] interesting thank you for going through the process with me of sculpting my father it's been um very cathartic for me and i hope you've learned a few things at the end of the day you have to push through yourself relook relook and as i say peel the layers of your eyes and force yourself to reach some form of likeness and that can only happen if you persevere look at many angles get the help of some family members if it's a family member or just other people objective views i'm also available for crits if you want to send me pictures and i can see a comparison i can always guide you that way um and other than that i'd like to just put this tutorial in into the context of the curve at 19 lockdown period 2020 south africa and that it gave me the opportunity to focus on teaching online and perhaps take this further and do some um live teaching other than that i hope you can find some joy in all of this and and carry on sculpting enjoy [Music] you

Channel: Marina Walsh Designs

Views: 170,224

Keywords: sculpting a head, sculpting a portrait, sculpt a portrait in clay, sculpt a head in clay, Marina Walsh, Marina walsh ceramics, sculpting a head, sculpting a head in clay, sculpting a head out of clay, sculpting, clay, tutorial, sculpting a portrait, sculpting a portrait in clay, art, sculpt a portrait in clay, how to sculpt a portrait in clay, sculpture, sculpture making, clay sculpting for beginners, clay sculpture, clay sculpting

Id: zKFH6BXEdsg

Length: 75min 52sec (4552 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 23 2020