So here's what 45 minutes can produce, while listening to Yo-Yo Ma, which was the perfect music for today. But this is just a start. Still very rough and in need of refinement of planes, not to mention details. I plan to play with it some more (and hopefully know when to stop). One of the most enjoyable things about this particular work was that it felt as though my hands were far more knowledgeable about the subtler forms of the face and head. Much more confident. Clearly the skull sculpt has been a valuable exercise (although I didn't touch it today).

I'm sure doing all these deep muscles is overkill, but I'm honestly having fun. Still struggling with trying to figure out which muscles go under others and which go over, especially for these deep muscles, but I'm hoping it'll all work out in the end. I do have a 3-D model of a facial ecorche but the deep muscles don't show, so it's not much help at this point.

Both of the muscles around the eye socket and the mouth start with "Orbicularis", which I'm guessing means something like "circular muscle", since they're both uniquely round (I haven't yet drawn in the muscles fibers on the mouth below, so it looks more smooth and skin-like -- I'll fix that next time).

Front view -- it looks a little off proportionally, but I think that's because I haven't put in the cartilage and muscles around the nose. Once that's in the nose will appear a bit lower than the nasal hole that's there now.

All that careful work I did on the right side of the skull, and now you're going to see the roughly-finished left side since that's the side I'm doing the musculature on. Oh well.. it'll soon be covered.

Now that I'm on to the ecorche' part I'm relying most heavily on a fantastic book -- Human Anatomy for Artists, by Eliot Goldfinger. A great resource as it isolates each individual muscle, showing exactly where it lies, where the origin and insertion points are and how thick it is. It's not a 3-D model, but it's the next best thing thanks to the thorough explanations and illustrations. It wasn't as helpful in modeling the skull, but for the muscles this book is great. My only complaint is that it doesn't seem to be laid out in the order that a sculptor would lay on the muscles, so I'm jumping around in the book and trying to figure out which muscles lie under and over each other. A bit of a challenge, but good for learning.

Skeletal part is *done*. I added the first rib and the front of the clavicles since some of the neck muscles attach there. Not having a full size skeleton model, though, I mostly roughed these in. I went to study an actual human skeleton that a friend of mine has access to, but while it helped some there were limitations. Nothing beats having a model right next to your sculpture to refer to, but I could only take photos of this specimen for my use. And anyway, it was a 4' 10" tiny little specimen, so it was like looking at a somewhat miniaturized version. But finally it's on to the musculature!