Feb 22 2010
The Head…continued….
Well here is my head cut in half. Well the clay head I made, not MY head….LOL. Mine got stuck on the plastic, but I got it off eventually. Here it is all flat and funny looking.
Caption: Front Half of head removed from armature.
And here is half of the head turned over so I could scoop out the excess clay. This is where you try and make sure most of the walls are the same thickness. You need to add wet clay to the inside with slurry where the wall is too thin. Wow it sure looks funny. Having them off the armature like this meant that they spread out a bit making the task of putting them back together somewhat harder. Plus I ended up with the back of the head flat. LOL Flat Head…..rotflmao.
Caption: Scooping out excess clay.
- Caption: Putting the two halves back together
- We put the two halves back together again. This was a job and a half for one person, so a lot of us helped each other out. The sides don’t meet properly as the head has got a little distorted. You couldn’t wait for the clay to get too hard before cutting it in half as it wouldn’t be able to be joined up again very successfully. However too wet and it distorts too much and puts too much strain on the clay, especially in places like under the chin or wherever there is sharp angles and heavy weight pulling the clay in a particular direction. Once you have scored the two halves where they will be joined and put lots of slurry on you gently push the two halves together. Using a separate coil of clay you help bridge the two halves by merging the coil into the seam.
-
- Caption: Build up the neck and smooth some of the face out.
I did some repair work, mostly around the neck that needed building up to support the head better. Smoothed out the worst of the rough bits, and did some more work on matching one cheek, cheekbone and jaw line with the other on the other side of the face.
Finally I started working on the eyes, eyelids and folds around the eyes. It took me all day to get one eye looking at least similar to the other. It was either too low or too small or just TOO something. That was the hardest to fix….the TOO SOMETHING….LOL cause it took a long time to figure out what the something was.
As you can see it wasn’t easy. The one on the left was great, it was just trying to get the one on the right. oh well, I think Ive got the worst of it done now….
Ill be back to post some more photos soon.
