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.