More in oil based clay

Some very low quality photos (my camera broke) of a bust I did at the Art Students League. I took a new class there, taught by Valentin Okorokov. It was seriously a lot of fun and I learned sooooo much! The method taught was a sort of simplified version of Edouard Lanteri's method (a common classic method of sculpture), and focused on the planes of the face and neck.

A Little Drawing

More from Tuesday night life drawing:

The pose was about an hour long. 18" x 24" charcoal on charcoal paper.

I saw this at the North Bennington Halloween Parade:

The skeleton even pedaled along with the guy up front :-D Pretty sweet.

Uuh... has anyone seen Em?

I found a life drawing session in Bennington, and came home with this:

Eyeball, tri-ball

After seeing two blog posts in two days, I had the sudden urge to immediately go make some new eyeballs.

And you know what? I think eyeballs aren't so scary after all! Kinda fun, really. Especially in sets of 3.

The one-eyed cherub

Some works in progress before I head to bed:

This first one has been pulled apart and restarted about three times already, I have been measuring off the reference (illustration shown in the background of the photo) and I probably should be doubling the size. Just looking at this picture now makes all the obvious structural changes stand out to me like a sore thumb (another very good reason to post often, it forces me to take a more critical look at what I'm doing).

And this, well, I'm putting this one up cause I started it sometime in June, and wanted to give myself a little bit of motivation to finish it up. It is life size, which makes me really excited to see how it will turn out (I'm using a live model, so comparing it against the real thing should be fun).

Hand, hand, fingers, thumb

Hands...

are a difficult subject. But well worth the effort.

The armature (aluminum and galvanized steel wire) :

About 1/2 way through the process:

More pictures to come tomorrow when I can shoot under some real sunshine.

The Clay: Chavant, NSP Soft "(Non Sulfurated Plasteline) ... sulfur free sculpting clay ... minimizes difficulties associated to mold making ... can be melted and poured at approximately 185°F."

This stuff is much harder than the Chavant Davinci Soft (shown in earlier posts). Still, it is very soft for modeling clay, sticky when warmed up (I heat it up in a clay oven to make it more pliable). Not great for super realistic detail, but I suspect that it will hold detail well enough when cooled below room temperature. I like this stuff because it is soft enough that my hands don't get tired, and it seems to stick well to an armature.