Tip Toland Workshop -- Sculpting a Clay Head - Free Tutorial

[Music] hi I'm tip Tolland and I'm going to be demonstrating how to make a clay head with special attention to proportion and the PLS and how they refer back to the skull so the next thing I want to say is that it's always nice to work in a happy environment what I do is work on a piece of 3/4 in plywood cut in quarters and I put the flange directly in the center this particular piece of pipe which would be down into the Torso could be any length you want depending on how far down you want to sculpt but this in this case this first piece is going to be 4 in then there's a 45° elbow the next piece which is the neck piece is 3 and 1/2 in then a 90° elbow and then this is a 5 in piece of pipe so I always want to make sure I have clear measurements this way I can always find the Armature I can always find the way through this midline and come up 8 in and I'll always be able to know where this 90 is and also this 45 so these are my tools we'll start with a cutting wire just a basic cutting wire cut the clay I love these big ribs these are flexible and very coarse grit then I graduate as I keep refining the sculpture to these less intense tooth DBS until you get to the very finest tooth and then I go to these more plastic ribs mostly for burnishing and smoothing and these brushes are part of the smoothing effect too they kind of make the whole head look more cohesive this is my favorite tool of all tools this is this beautiful modeling tool from China it's made out of this beautifully hard wood of course I always want a fety knife every time I am near clay these are skewers I'll show you what I do with them in a minute a needle tool all of these Loop tools are good for gouging out eye sockets and they're particularly useful when I cut the top of the head off for scooping out all of the clay so I'm going to start by wrapping the pipe with Clay I want to get it on there as tight as I can to minimize any air pockets so I'm going to be making a kind of a generic northern European maale the first thing after you've wrapped the pipe is to find your uh measurement points again and that should be the middle of the 45° elbow that 45° elbow is our sternal notch and I make sure that that's that's a key measuring point so because from there we can determine how high the chin and how deep the clay is on top of the pipe so this is all the clay depth I have so far so we're going to usually go a little bit deeper about an inch and a half this is important so that when we Hollow it out we don't go through there's plenty of thickness in the walls of the clay then we are going to measure up again8 to find the 90° and put a skewer there now I know we won't have now that that 8 in up is only where the pipe is we can determine a different chin height right now we have just a very little bit of Clay on that chin so we're going to put some more over it [Music] the [Music] I want you to keep in mind that basically the skull is kind of a ball if you look at the very back it's sort of this is the ball of the cranium is is about as tall as it is wide and then it's almost like if you went halfway back like a mask hangs on this ball so now what I do is use my my big rib and just really integrate I've been hammering it on with my with my fist so as to pound it so I don't get any air pockets and now I just want to integrate this kind of is wonderful because it it lets you score the clay which is scratch it up move clay around and because it's scored it attaches new clay attaches to it beautifully it's important when you massing in the head that you do the neck at the same time for the face I use a little softer clay for the outer layer so I want a stiffer Clay on the inside a little softer Clay on the outside if you're actually working from a model it's important that you get the sternal notch to the chin this height measurement as far as how far out the chin is straight down from the stern to the sternal notch okay so now we're in pretty good shape to to look at basically to look at the symmetry so what we'll do is we'll take this Center Line when we Cube the board this is our Center Line which we're calling the midline so we'll take this midline right up the neck neck should intersect all the way up divide it dividing the face in half and right on over the top of the head coming on down and meeting the line on the other side so now it's time to measure the head chin to Crown and make sure that these are perfectly parallel so it would be between these to we want to take that and that would be our chin to Crown measurement and what we have here is 8 and 1/2 so that's a very standard size Cranium this clay does shrink so it'll end up being about an 8 in head um now what we want to do is measure is is begin to map the face slightly and then we can take a depth of skull measurement so we're going to go up about halfway from the chin to the top and actually I could eyeball this but if it's 8 and 1/2 I'll go up 4 and A4 and just make that our Center Line just above it and sort of Notch that this will behave as our Bridge from their straight back that will be and it should be the deepest part of the skull so it would be between here we want to make sure this is parallel to the edge of the board and the very back of the skull if we took this straight back back be about here and then we would measure between these two this is just going to tell us how deep our skull is which is 8 and 1/4 that's perfectly fine the widest part of the face is different than the widest part of the skull so how we would find those two measurements are as such if we have the depth of the skull in place then what we'll do is we'll go back and we'll measure between these two points halfway and that halfway would be parallel to this plane which is slightly coming back it's not a perfect vertical so if we find that halfway point here I'm saying that this looks to me about how halfway if we were to cut this skull directly in half this would be our halfway point does that look about right okay so we would come back this then is our jaw line so this would be the widest part of the skull itself just above the ear behind the halfway point so in terms of mapping the face we want to map the face um horizontally first so how we'll do that because we've determined the ey line which is halfway from chin to Crown and uh if we've determined the ey line we know that the eyes go somewhere on this line and if it's a male we're making they'll sit right on top of this ey line the this halfway mark would intersect the eye if it was a female skull so there'll be somewhere in this vicinity and we can plot in the brow we first need the eye and then we can plot in the brow if we have this ey line then the brow then we can make a determination about the hairline and if it's a generic kind of head that you're making up from out of left feeli you can determine this hairline to go as far back as you want to within reason so we're going to put it here because what you're going to be measuring is the distance between the brow line here and the beginning of this hairline because really if you break it down just proportions of the face themselves it's 1/3 from the hairline to the brow line one/ thir from brow line to the nose bottom of nose and another third to the bottom of the chin after we've done that we can think about dividing the head in terms of vertically so we know where those eyes go on that ey line this would be one fifth the next fifth the middle fifth the outer fifth and then the the fourth fifth and the outer fifth here the reason why these are important to place to cut the face into fifths the whole head actually is because now we know that the eyes generally will fit inside these two inner fifths that's where they belong now there's an eyes difference there's an eye width between between these two eyes here and there should be an eyes width on either side of each eye we're going to determine where the ears go and the ears we can generally rule of thumb is the top of the brow if you just take that right on back and the bottom of the nose just take that right on back see if we did that so that the ears would fall right here behind the jaw so on the back half of the skull that's where the x marks the spot for the ears the reason why we want to find the ears right now is because then we can find the cheekbones and that'll enable us to sort of find the widest part of the face so here's our nose want to bring our nose back so now we know here's our ear so perhaps the widest part of the head might be a tiny bit higher x marks the spot for the widest part of the head there and the widest part of the head here could go up just a tad to here okay so if this is our here we know that the hole from the ear into the skull would be right about in there why that's important is cuz that will tell us that the cheek bone will come out like this and then drop in to create the top of the jaw the socket uh of the eye is actually this is also comes in and becomes this cheekbone so this comes out so this is our cheek bone the widest part of the bone itself is probably right in here it's not back next to the ear it's out a little bit further from the ear so this would then mean that bone is the widest part of the face we're going to put a little spot there and that should be the white Wiest part of the face there and we could do it on the other side so everything from there would come down from there and down from here everything from the widest part of the skull would come in and back uh and taper back from there so those are good these are two important key widths to keep in mind okay we'll pull this out we can just add a little little bit of cheek in there and we'll make sense of this later it's just going to tell us that that's our cheekbone and that's our width of our face okay now because we know where the eyes belong the nose belongs we can determine the mouth halfway between the bottom of the nose put a big n here for nose and the bottom of the chin halfway roughly somewhere in here is the bottom of the bottom lip so the very bottom of the mouth will sit on that halfway point okay now we know where things go what we can do now is follow these outer fifth lines the outer fifth line all the way up all the way because this will give us we can think about this this as the side planes of the head and skull and this is another side plane this is really when the when the head and the face drastically turns Corners the face itself is between these two these three fists right here between here and here from this fifth back it's a it's a beveling and is a very strong plane change right along this line coming into these three inner fifths so we're going to make those ples changes now and there's a bony Ridge right that comes right down um that makes a space for that muscle and often times around our temples it's even concave in there so we're going to just make that very evident along each side and then right under this cheekbone we're just going to kind of come in at an angle just a little bit of an angle like that by doing that we also will age we will age this character the Fuller the cheeks in here the younger the character will look this is also where the cheek itself the zygomatic right here turns the corner and goes makes a beline for the nose and it goes inward quite significantly so it's really like almost a not quite a 90° but a very strong angle inward here's our socket we have the eyes they fall on top of the ey line the brow would come like so but the eye socket comes down and a great big V is cut back into this outer fifth comes down like this comes over the inner fifth so that they sort of look like uh pilot glasses here's our outer fifth we cut a huge V it's amazing how far back these V's are cut so we can have all the peripheral vision that we have also the inner the inner uh parts of this socket are beveled to be a to come up thinner so that we have a narrow bridge of the nose we take the ball of the eye line it up as close as we can pull the wire through so as to get what we're we're not going to score and put them in permanently just yet the relationship of the cornea which is the furthest extension of the ball of the eye is in right relationship to the bridge since the bridge isn't really going to be changing we want to make sure that this relationship is good so depending on your subject anywhere between a/4 and a half an inch you want the cornea recessed that much so I've put in the one eye and now I'm going to try get the ey lined up so that it matches now what we're going to do is make little tiny coils and set them in all the way around the ball and this will fill in that negative space so now we want to make sure that uh we have the proper depth with between the forehead the brow Ridge and underneath the socket so actually what we want from a profile standpoint is an angle like so so we have clearly too much bone down there so we're going to cut this away we're going to just slice I can do it like so from the outer Fifth Line where the fullest extent of that cheekbone turns the corner this is considered the flat part of the face we're going to cut and just make this ramp just like this and it's just going to ease off as it goes down the face and ramp up to make that and we'll do the same thing on the other side trying to make it as symmetrical as we can so now you see from the profile the orientation of top of brow top of eye socket is this which is what we want the other thing what we can do at this point is to give before we actually put the lids on the eyes is to give a little brow Ridge usually if it's a male there's there's much more of a distinguishable brow Ridge than a female so we're going to some some brow ridges are are really serious but we're going to just give this guy something of a gentl is brow Ridge and his his brow would sit right over that it's just a little bit extra bone the women will have subtle one but men's they all men don't have it of course but if there's a brow Ridge to be found it would be on a male now foreheads have a lot of personality you can put in a little extra bone right up in here and in here I think I'll go to my finer rib now if you do that this is a lovely way to kind of integrate we're going to actually draw in the eyes we're going to remember right this is our eye line here so we're going to carry that on right across the eyeball right across the eyeball what we put in in terms of that inner coil of clay around the ball of the eye will act as this little muscle in the corner of the eye which should should be right here and so we're going to um draw in the eye and include that as the corner so in other words our eye will be sort of like so we'll include this corner into one of the things about eyes that's good to remember is that the outer corner here is higher than the inner corner of the the eye just what you see of the eyeball itself it's also a good idea to do a little indentation along the bottom lid so that you can keep this a nice little shelf it's terrible when you get a very very thin lower eyelid or upper eyelid it just doesn't look like uh well it doesn't read as Skin would and it needs to be able to catch the light that comes down from the above this is just a filler just pushing this down into that negative space of the socket very strong plane change between where the socket starts and this ramp up to the nose so we want to keep that always in mind then the bottom lid just follows the orb of the eye all the way around the eyes are so so important that I end up spending often days and days on the eyes just getting them exactly right it's getting the planes right getting the expression getting the focal length correct all right so that's our bottom lid the top lid now use sort of moist clay for this the top lid's going to be a thicker coil that's a little bit tapered on one side and start from that corner come up and down and over top of that lower lower coil you want that upper lid to be a bit thicker than the lower lid and we're going to do another coil to feel in back in here here's a rule of thumb and this is true a great deal of the time and that's this upper lid arcs early so it would Arc right in about here the arrow right in about here generally speaking and then Boop down and create that beautiful arcing coming down whereas the lower lid arcs much later on arcs about like here and then swings up to make a higher Corner than the inside corner so so this comes out relatively gently down down gently and then a big turn right here usually the lower lid is not not curved as much as the upper lid it's a gentler curve this corner should be a little higher than your inside corner often times if there isn't an angle like this has a good orientation top lid to bottom lid along this angle once you have the lids of the eyes on to make it interesting for yourself Now's the Time where you can introduce a narrative into the situation if you want to go there which makes it sort of uh you you feel sort of like you're the creator of of making a plot and so eye contact or eye direction is uh huge in sort of suggesting narrative so if the eyes are like so straight ahead of you then they tend to look a little bit Frozen if they as are off to one side ever so slightly they can either be in relationship to something else looking at something else which you as the viewer don't ever really know you just make it up or you can have much more of a sort of a clear Focus like The Wider the eyelid goes the more you get the feeling that they're actually looking and engaging in something a more thoughtful uh eye position is when you just sort of have a them looking afar but not at anything and these are subtle subtle kinds of things to do with where you put the iris where you position the eyes and of course the closer you get to looking at anything the closer the the pupils the iris come together and the further away on the horizon they sort of separate so now is a great time where you can decide on uh where you want to put the eyes so just to make this intriguing I'm going to put the eyes off to one side okay the iris itself is about a third of what you see of the whites of the eyes it takes up about 13 so now we sort of have a something someone looking over to the side which sort of makes things a bit more interesting one thing you can do little tricks are if you know you're going to put the dry eyes in a directional way you can lift the lid ever so slightly because the corny you would push that lid up ever so slightly in that direction so by doing that it reinforces the direction where the eyes are looking so put just a tiny bit of bulge where that cornea is just a tiniest bit which will also uh help Define the direction and uh and then push up right on this eyelid so the eye would be just a little bit the lid would be just a little bit thicker right in there I'm going to show you one quick little way to finish these eyes because uh the fingers is just a little too big to get in here but a brush works really nicely now these eyeballs and these Lids are only in uh the sockets so far all by themselves what they need is all of this padding that create the crease see right now I think this guy looks quite suspicious but we can create even more suspicion on him first what we'll do is we'll fill in right this pad right under the brow that fills this in this will create the seam and it rounds on up fill in so we could create all of this in here which is the soft tissue around the eye the deepest Hollow would be in this corner so we'll leave a little bit of a hollow but this would come out like so now the next piece we want is the nose so we want to make a kind of a triangular piece with the angled sides that comes down like that with a top plane and we'll sort of see how far down we want to go we're going to go right off of this bridge we might just cut this flat to house it and score we know we want to go down to there so you can always cut the length after it's on so it's nice to really put on that nose keep these sides of it ramped hits the bridge and then it comes down and makes this wonderful kind of of uh angle so almost perfect triangular cutaway right in there as the ramp from the nose hits the socket and creates that nice plain change in there so I'm really keen on keen on that we'll just make this work over here on the other side too I just love a good nose I just love a a good nose and I and there's a lot of really good noses in the world so one thing I like about a good nose is the way it jumps off of the bone so it's all bone coming down from the bridge to about here right there is the end of the bone and the beage of the cartilage so often times there's a sort of a uh sort of a bump here and uh it falls off and then goes to the round ball of the nose here which is often times lower right where it is the broadest is right before it jumps off so it would be Broad and then come in and then come out again to the ball of the nose and I'm awful keen on that too so going to beef up the ball of the nose and my most favorite sort of nose is when you can see the two pieces of cartilage which set up the ball of the nose there's a division in between them very very often giving the nose a kind of a cleavage I grew up with a woman who had a awesome nose cleavage and I used to just look at her nose for I hardly heard a thing she said I was so interested in her nose now the rule of thumb is is that the nostrils want to come out to the eye Corners so if we go straight up from the edge of the nostril we will hit the eye corner I'm going to give it just a little tiny bit more of a v often times that nose comes in makes a lovely V and then we can Dr draw in the parentheses from the nose down we can sort of create the parentheses of the crease the shape of the mouth totally follows the jaw so if you look at the chin on this little guy you'll see this rounded horseshoe and if you could it and it's because really all of this this whole jaw is a horseshoe and it's incredibly important that the skin that you're putting on as a mouth actually incorporates about the outer third of that horseshoe curve so we're going to put the upper lip on and it's going to be the whole upper lip all in one Fell Swoop we going to make something that starts about halfway out if you're looking profile halfway out from the back of the nostril to the end of the nose halfway back would be about here this is where we want that upper lip to start so that we can taper it around to get us to get give us that horseshoe we'll tuck it underneath this nose here and just push it up into there then it sort of just now what will happen you'll push it a little bit into what would be the nostrils and then taper it from there and what you'll end up doing is res sculpting the very bottom of the nostril as it comes around so you'll have to sculpt that in there sort of just take add a little bit of that clay around in there then we know that if the bottom is halfway between the nose and the chin the bottom of the mouth would be like so and the middle parting of the lips and then this would be the bottom lip here but we're just going to cut it actually where the lip where The Parting of the lips I'm just going to cut it straight across and get rid of this all together and we'll cut this up to the top line which we've drawn at the on a bevel taper it just cut it 45° off this is now our top top lip can always put in a filtrum well I think I'll cut it um now our job is to put in the bottom lip so the bottom lip is going to be right in here I usually start with fresh clay and I just make a coil with two tapered ends as you can see this could be a very raw form of a bottom lip and now I'll go about trying to make that really integrated and sculpted the first thing I think I would do is I just give a little bit of a a middle sort of a fullness to that upper lip often times lips are not always and it depends on the age of the person but there's three components to the top lip there's this form here that hangs a little low and it has a corresponding dip in the lower lip itself but I love that part of a lip comes up and then often times there's a fullness right in here on each side of that upper lip you want to make the the peaks of that upper lip very clear the lower lip is usually shorter than the upper lip it isn't as wide and it has two big forms to it one one on each side sort of like two forms coming together now not every mouth will look like that granted but Elvis Presley had a really good mouth now if the eyes were looking dead at us the pupil would come down probably right in here and that would be the edge of our mouth so we could kind of imagine that if this is our mouth then this would be off this would be the dimple here and the edge bottom lip tucks under that top lip this is The Edge over here and I'll go back and clean clean up these lips and sculpt them before I do that though I just want to put in the supporting muscles there's these wonderful muscles that circulate around the mouth and there're some of my most favorite forms so I'm going to include those they often create a really cool shadow so they often these muscle forms come down often creating a shadow here underneath it comes up under that bottom lip and down here and then of course last but not least we give him a chin pad which is just no more than I'd say a little a little button like so that we just put right here so I'll take a moment to clean him up and show you what I've done [Music] we're back and I have cleaned him up just a little bit so I'll show you what I've done because I've made a few shifts in um where I put things I realized when I was talking about laying out proportion and uh if you recall it was thirds from the hairline to the brow brow to the nose bottom of nose to bottom of chin and I kept looking at him and going this isn't quite right well his nose was too long so I shortened the nose up so you can see it a little bit better at profile this is a hairline brow line line nose line chin line so he's a bit more in proportion now the other thing I was doing was when I was putting in the eyes and this happens a lot is when you put in a directional look to the eyes and they were coming over to the side sometimes that can really throw you off in terms of getting them equid distance from the midline so where they're looking in this case they were looking over here this I kept drifting closer to the nose so you have to be a little bit mindful so what I did in order to correct that was just give him a front and center look so he doesn't look like he's he's not basically there's no Iris now put in whatsoever so I could still do that starting with this blank uh look then I could set the iris and put in the directional um eyes that I wanted to have so that's a that's one of the that's one way you can help yourself correct if there's asymmetry in those eyes another thing that's really important is to keep looking at the piece from an aerial perspective and from a worm perspective looking right up at the nostrils from underneath CU it'll really show you that depth um it'll really show you the asymmetry if one side's recessed more than the other side it's really a good thing to be able to do that so given all of that uh I shorten the nose but I kept the cleavage which is my favorite put a little bit of a Kirk Douglas chin on him carried the cleavage down into the chin and so now I could just go ahead and um use my brush to clean him up I also gave him an Adams Apple something that is a classically male attribute make a little Lake of water here and uh just clean them up just a little bit this kind of integrates everything what I'll do now is just flesh his face out a little bit more by following the parentheses of the creases around the mouth and we can sort of start here come down now we don't want to go too low or we'll or we'll get we don't want jows he's he's way too young for jows we come down like so and just sort of fade it off and these two coils can give you that extra tissue we might even give a little bit more cheek above that this is the flattest part of the face in here right off the ramp of the nose right in here is the flats where the cheekbone comes and makes a beine for that ramp of the nose so we could give a little bit more cheek in here a little fullness right on that and then it'll come into the fullness right around the right in here let me look at it front in the front so the Fuller these cheeks are probably the more youthful this fellow will look we don't want him to look too youthful just just lovely kind of classically youthful so if he's classically youthful these Fade Out These creases they'll just Fade Out sort of Midway um Midway down they're always outside of the corners of the mouth if you hear any snoring it's my dog Willie keeping me company now we're going to begin making the ears so knowing that the ear belongs in the X we're going to measure that so I take my slab and I pound it down a little bit till it's about a half an inch thick and I'm going to hold it up right at this height I'm going to Mark the bottom and the top so now I have basically the height of the ear so this is a way that I guess I developed in order to make matching ears and I draw a heart shape minus the bottom [Music] so this is my heart shape now I'll cut this out roughly a heart shape and uh cut it right down the middle now I'll have two matching ears theoretically we'll put one ear aside and we'll just try well actually what we'll do is we'll make a wedge out of this side of the heart so that the broad side is on the outside and then it wedges down kind of significantly I think sometimes the ear isn't always right at the very top of the brow so I'm sort of putting it at the top of the eyelid the ear in the angle should follow the angle of the jaw some people have much more of a straight vertical jaw and in that case put the ear more vertically allow the ear to follow the line of the jaw um now how I create the inside of the ear I start by drawing and uh I'm going to draw the outer the outer big area take this part and connect it there and this this whole shape reminds me of a nine so I just call that the nine of the ear the this little fland trus comes here then there's this negative space that comes right down in here and makes a little Reservoir right at the bottom of the trus this then is the lobe and we can clean that up so now we're going to take our little Loop tool and remove some of this just go go ahead and remove that in there kind of dig a little ditch we're going to soften this Edge then inside this negative space this is what we're just going to do is take some of that negative space out leaving the tail of the nine in there now the tail of this nine actually goes and just disappears down in there in that negative space I'm going to just put this and add onto this outer Realm of the ear right in here take it right down and disappear that into that negative space then uh I put another little coil around that negative space come in from here and just connect it comes up and all the way down and around this Reservoir so it just circles and surrounds this negative space and comes up and sort of becomes a little bit more uh so that the flange can be just a bit more pronounced the trus I mean the only uh thing left to do besides cleaning this up is that is to create a little ditch there's always a little ditch all of the components are here except for this little ditch which is right here um right above the negative space and what happens is is that there's a little rise uh of the a little rise just on top of that ditch of of tissue not clay that goes to create a sort of a y that that comes down around that negative space so we'll just integrate that okay so in order to get a matching a good matching ear over here you want want to keep referring to this use this ear as your model but keep looking at it from an aerial standpoint to make sure that they're on the same plane coming back on the head the last piece about the ear is to make sure that the back is modeled like the back of an ear would be so in an effort to clean him up I guess I go to my very finest rib first serrated rib which is very uh small tooth and I just love it it's flexible so it can fit over the Arc of his head and come towards me and I usually like to have something in the background so that I do get a good Edge so I can see the edge of him really well um after all of his features are pretty much on there then I just want to establish the finer points like if I want a hollow under that cheek that would come in here if I want those jaw bones to be a little bit more P pronounced I come in just a little bit under I love this particular Edge the temporal Ridge coming down in a little low then the cheekbone then the Hollywood Hollow of that cheek under that cheekbone so so that they match and then the end result I took a little bit more uh I cleaned the angles of the jaw up so that they're very clearly articulated first of all this gives him a very a more masculine look if it's if it was a female jaw this would be th a thinner jaw and just kind of more gently rounded and so here we'll we'll clean them up a little bit more there's a soft brush that just barely just hits the surface of the clay and then there's this very stiff brush and this actually moves a lot of clay around I don't touch his eyes with this brush as it would just squish out it's important when you put on um eyebrows or or anything like that sideburns or whatever it is that you uh that you put first the mound on and erase all seams and then come in with uh the brow so if this was to be my brow I'd want to kind of of just add a little bit of Cl and he already has a pretty big Ridge uh so then on the very end uh which takes days usually in the studio but I come in with this wonderful burnishing rib this really can smooth so I'll continue cleaning him up and um let you see how he could look and then we'll call it a call it a day [Music] la [Music] the [Music] well thanks for watching I hope it was helpful it was fun making him take care [Music]

Channel: Tip Toland

Views: 1,014,352

Keywords: art, sculp, sculpting, clay, Head, Sculpture (Visual Art Form), Fine Art (Industry), sculptor

Id: F8Y797g_Jg4

Length: 66min 50sec (4010 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2015