Day 241

Next I moved onto the head. The book let me do my own thing for it. I didn't want to sculpt a face from scratch so I decided to find some reference images. I picked an actress that I liked. I won't tell you who it is because my finished product does not likely resemble the person. One nice thing about picking a famous person is that there's plenty of photos of them online. I couldn't find a nice profile picture though.

Trying to sculpt a real life person is tough so I was getting frustrated at times when things weren't looking right. I think that's one reason I didn't save any in progress images since I was never satisfied with what I was doing until the later stages. While the final result may not look like the person, I did end up with a fairly good looking face. The actress is young so I didn't have to worry about any wrinkles or anything like that. The face might be a little too smooth and perfect though. I skipped the fold in the eyelid but maybe I'll be able to paint that in later.

I figure I should say something about the process. The ear I sculpted from scratch. I didn't try to make it look like the actual person's ear. The nose was tricky to get right. It wasn't hard to make it look like a nose at different angles but when I looked straight on, I could see that something was off. Since I had a straight on photo, I knew what it should look like but it took some time to get there. I'm referring to the nostril shape and the bottom of the nose area - around the nostrils and how it connects to the area above the mouth. Unfortunately there weren't many up the nostril shots of this actress. For the eyes, I created a sphere. I had to make sure it was the right size and in the right place. Because the eyelid has to be sculpted in relation to the sphere, if the sphere is wrong, then the shape of the eye is thrown off. The mouth was tough to get started mainly because you're working with a single sheet of polygons when in reality the mouth is two lumps of flesh touching each other. But once you get the general shape, it becomes easier.