Clay Head Sculpture

When I was in college, one of the projects that we had was to make a clay head sculpture. The more I worked on the project, the more I realized it looked like a previous neighbor I had, so I nicknamed the character Gary. When his wife came over and saw the sculpture, she actually made the comment that the sculpture did, in fact, look like her husband. This is a sculpture portrait that I did back in ‘08, and I just found the photos on my computer.

Though I never put this one in the kiln, I’ve always been happy with how it turned out. I wanted him to show the harder life the model has had with the deep cuts and strong texture. I must say, I am pretty happy how this sculpture turned out.

Building the Clay Head Sculpture

When building the clay head sculpture, I first built out the armature which was going to hold the clay. I knew that it was going to be a fairly heavy amount of clay, so I built a strong armature and near the end, I was very happy that I did as this thing was heavy! As I built it out, I had a strong light on one side of the sculpture to give me a strong showing of form and continued to rotate it as I was building it out. Below is the final turn around of the sculpture. I really wish I fired it and still had it.npm