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!

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):