Monday, September 22, 2014

Bustin' Loose

Going into this class I was probably most excited about learning how to sculpt a bust. As a fan of portraiture I'm quite drawn to busts and always saw it as a natural progression for my own work.

As usual we spent an entire 5 hour session working from a live model for this piece, but I spent most of my time working on it at home from digital images taken during the session. Here are a few photos of the bust pre-firing.

They all start bald like a baby

Getting there

Here's the finished version next to his doppelgangers, waiting to be fired


Side view

This piece is a good example of how over glazing can ruin a piece. I wanted this piece to turn out well so badly that I spent too much time fussing with the glazes, instead of performing careful glaze tests prior to the final glazing. The end result was a muddied mess.






It wasn't a total disaster, but I wish I had put as much care into glazing the piece as I did in sculpting it. Oh well, lesson learned. Hopefully this will just be the first bust of many. 


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