The Sculpt

After finishing off my final face cast i was now ready to start my sculpt! This step in making a prosthetic is very important because it's essentially what your final piece is going to look like. I knew that I wanted my character to be like something out of a nightmare, yet I knew that I wanted to still keep some femininity in there. My character is a bird/woman hybrid and I knew that I wanted a beak to be a main facial feature.
The clay used was a Plasticine based clay, this was so it would not dry out like regular water based clay, this enabled me to work on my sculpt over a series of days, as well as giving them the option of re-sculpting and reshaping any bits I did not like.

I began by warming up the clay in the oven for a couple of minutes, this made it soft and easier to sculpt with, I also purchased a set of sculpting tools off of ebay, this helped with any detail etc that I needed to add.

Firstly, I used small pieces of clay and added them to the points of the face I wanted to accentuate, in my case this was the nose, chin, eyebrows and cheekbones. This part of the sculpt does not need to be neat.

I continued building up the nose until I had made a large beak shape, below is the first beak shape that I achieved. The detail can be added later.

Upon vieweing the above photograph, I deicded that I did not like the placement of the bottom beak, I also thought the top needed to come down lower, I did not like the idea of being able to clearly see my models mouth through the beak. To comebat this, i continued to build the top beak higher, whilst I completely removed the bottom beak and moved it higher, now the edge of the bottom beak finished directly on my models lip, meaning when she moved her bottom lip (hopefully) the bottom beak would move with it.

After working for some time on my sculpt I was still not happy with it. Something I could not put my finger on was bothering me about it, however it was still early days and I used this time to experiment with possible skin textures. Above i tried a 'pulled skin' look around the beak. However I did not like the outcome and decided to scrape it back off and start again. I also continued to shear the top beak down as I thought I had bought it out too far.

These minor changes kept being made until I was happy with the all around shape. 

Here is my sculpt after I had completely smoothed it down. I added small details onto the beak and wrinkles into the eyebrows, as well as drawing on a symbol on the forehead to ensure it tied it with my characters back story. 

As you can see the bottom beak was brought as high as possible, whilst the top beak was made wider and lead more out into the cheek bones. At this stage no texture had been brought to the clay and I still felt that something didn't mesh right. 

However, I then used a wire brush to add detail onto the entire face, I followed the contours of the face with this and used talcum powder and a soft brush along the way, the talcum powder helped any loose bits of clay fall right off. My sculpt looked instantly better with the all over texture, the eyebrows looked more natural and the symbol on the forehead looked carved in, which was the look I was aiming for (however in my excitement I completely forget to take photographic evidence, my bad!)

Anyway, my sculpt was now finished and ready to be cast!