Felt a little bit like a dentist today, spending much of my time on the teeth. Thank god for those little rubber-tipped clay tools. They were perfect for this particular job. I still need to go back and lengthen the front couple of teeth a bit and adjust the gum line down in front (hmm... the bony part is probably not referred to as "gums", true?), but it's coming along. I also did some major tweaking to the mandible as well as the whole back half-hemisphere of the skull, removing a significant amount of clay. Still a lot more to do to get it refined to the level I want it, but the end is in sight. You can see the two skull models I've been working from below. Big differences between the two! The one on the right is a female skull, but the bony parts around the teeth are significantly eroded, so I'm glad to have the other skull to fill in the missing information.

A little glimpse at my work set-up. I've been keeping track of my hours on this project and it's been about 40 hours so far, not including the time on the armature.

Wrapping up the cervical spine. I wouldn't call it perfectly rendered, but I think it's decent enough to call good. For now. Most importantly, I've learned a lot about about the specifics of the forms of the vertebrae, with much thanks to the model I purchased. I'm convinced that when it comes to learning artistic anatomy, your money is generally better spent purchasing quality models than taking a class. And what's next? Tomorrow I'll revisit the skull and start the final refinements. Not sure I'll get to the ecorche' this week, but definitely soon..

Just wasn't in the mood to work on the skull project today. The tedium of working from educational models is getting to me and my hands want to do more expressive things. So today was more clay-doodling. Although it looks like one piece in the photo below, these are two separate pieces. Did the head study first (second photo below to show a different angle), then it was back to the mouth/lip studies that I find so fascinating. This one's way off. I feel out of practice. Next move will be to work up some drawing studies. Hopefully between drawing and modeling (over and over) I'll start to get this down someday.

Ironically, my neck is sore from working on this neck. I've got my sculpture stand cranked up to the highest mark but with all this detail and oddly curved bits and pieces I'm craning my neck plenty to get them all worked out. Spent the day on just this one profile side of the vertebrae and got about halfway up the front side (you can see below just how rough the upper part of the front of the neck is). The other side of the neck is going to be trickier because the threaded rod of the armature isn't on center and so will be exposed. I'll have to carve the vertebrae around it, which will be bothersome... so I've decided to make that side the one I'll do the ecorche' on. Which means I'm not going to fuss so much with modeling every last detail of the vertebrae on that side since it'll all be covered with muscle anyway. But *this* side I want looking nice. I'll put up with whatever neck pain I need to in order to get it looking decent.

Reason #48 for why it's nice to live in a big city: It's no problem to skip down to your local anatomical models manufacturer and pick up a decent cervical spine model.

Yes, I bought a model and what a difference it makes! In the same time it took me to (very poorly) model just one vertebrae yesterday, I roughed out all seven today, including reworking the one I took a stab at yesterday. Still lots of adjusting and tweaking and refining to do on these, but it's coming along very quickly now --

And here's my new buddy, come to save the day (cue angelic choir):

I've become quite stuck. With no good life-size model of the cervical vertebral column to work with I'm having a hard time modeling this part. I brought in a bunch of printed images today but vertebrae are like the pelvic bone, so full of twists and turns, strange curves and protrusions that you really need a 3-dimensional model to truly understand it. Spent several hours today *just* on the atlas, the top-most vertebrae. ... ugh ... But I'll tell you this -- the first two vertebrae of the spinal column, the atlas and the axis, are really wonderful and amazing bones.

But given the challenge of sculpting such convoluted 3-dimensional forms from 2-D images, I'm debating now whether to spring for a (cheap) 3-D model of this part of the spine, or if I should just go ahead and create a very generalized (and probably incorrect in more ways than I want to consider) cervical column, remembering that my whole goal with this project is to learn the basic underlying structure of the head and neck. I don't need to model absolutely perfect vertebrae to get a good working knowledge of the musculature of the neck. But then, I love these sorts of challenges and take great delight in learning all the subtleties of form.

Just the start of the rough shapes of the cervical vertebrae. A little challenging since I don't have any good life-sized models. Even my anatomy books don't show these vertebrae very well. It's got me thinking now -- maybe Santa will bring me a decent full-sized skeleton for Christmas? 

All this technical work. It's good knowledge to have but is not what I want to do ultimately. I much prefer a sort of 'abstracted realism' approach at this point in my aesthetic sensibility. The other thing about doing technical "copy from sight" exercises is that they lack the kind of generative creativity I crave. Nachmanovitch writes, "Competance that loses a sense of its roots in the playful spirit becomes ensconced in rigid forms of professionalism." Precisely. So I did the following in the spirit of play. I'm calling it "Cheese Doodle In Clay" (no cheese was harmed in the making of this sculpt) --