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CITY-0-Clay

Current Rants and Recent Rambles

Sculpting and THE FEAR

09-22-04

So don't let THE FEAR keep you from sculpting. It does take
practice. There are short cuts and tricks to sculpting faces with
expressions. For the review on sculpting figures and faces, here's
the link,

http://www.norajean.com/New_Projects/Review-FacesFigures.htm

Pick someone you would like to look at for a long time. A favorite
actress or actor, go to the web and copy pictures of them, like mug
shots: right, left, looking up, looking down, serious, smiling. Make
a collage of these pictures. I put my collage up as my Desktop
background, so I can look at it by just closing all windows on my
computer.

Now here's a trick for doing portrait sculpting. Take a picture of a
person, let's say a face forward shot. With a piece of plastic wrap
or a sheet of tracing paper, make a grid over that face. Divide it
down the center forehead to chin. Divide it in the middle from right
to left. Make more grid lines to show where the eyes, eyebrows,
nostrils, lower lip are located. Do a grid for the left side of the
face. For the right side of the face.

After a while you can make this grid in your mind's eye. For
learning face sculpting this grid helped me a lot. Not all faces in
real life are ideally proportional, but it does help to learn how to
do an average proportioned face before we start doing faces with
characteristics like age, weight or expression.

When sculpting the face of an adult the middle line from right to
left is the eyeball line, half way up the head from that middle line
is the hair line. For babies the middle line from right to left is
their hair line, all the features are clustered under the middle
line. When you see old sculptures or paintings of babies that look
weird you'll see they were using the adult ratios of where the
features were clustered. These different examples are what we're
going to review in Demo.

What makes a man's face manly? In demo the ClayMates were able to
see a face with no features turn into a man. What are the markers on
a man's face that make us recognize it as male without much detail?

The jaw line, brow shape are Testosterone markers.

Females have a smaller jaw line, not as prominent forehead, fuller
lips, all markers of Estrogen.

I'd also like us to do some experiments in sculpting different
racial groups, so color mixing for skin of different hues is
something I'd like to do with you.

From the time I was a child I got annoyed with "Flesh" colored
crayons. I didn't figure my flesh or the flesh of my friends in
Oakland, Ca, looked like that. My first distrust of an authority is
with that crayon.

So let's work on skin color mixing.

Ok, coffee cup needs a refill so I'll send this off.

xoxo

NJ

 

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