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. 

Back to the Figure

This is one of the first finished sculptures I produced in the class. I think it may have been from our second session. We worked on this pose for around five hours in total from a live model. As you can see the left arm broke off when it was fired and I had to reattach it with gorilla glue, but I have to admit that I do like the character that the crack brings to the figure. Surprisingly this is one of my most successfully glazed pieces. I used a red iron stain on the figure which I then wiped off so it would only remain in the indentations. 

I was a little more successful in defining the back of the figure than the front. At this point we hadn't had a lot of practice working on faces, so you can see that mine is a bit out of proportion and less defined. As are the hands and feet. The model was incredibly skinny, which provided a lot of good musculature and bone indentation to define. When it comes to drawing and sculpting people I always prefer bodies that are a little more extreme. Skinnier, heavier, wrinkled. They just make for more interesting subjects. Beautiful people are just a bit more boring to render, in my opinion. 

It's interesting to me how the mood of the sculpture changes depending on which direction you look at it. Which viewpoint do you like the most out of the top three?