Progress Update Part 1...

Over my days off this week I decided to give myself the task of finishing all the sculpting for the heads for the bands video so that they were at a stage where they could be painted.

Turns out it was a lot more work than I first thought, though I did pretty much finish the bands heads on day one, leaving only a little to finish on day two and the lion masks to do on the lead characters heads.

I had already created the basic shape of the bands heads and added the nose and ears to each so the last bit to do was the hair. I started by adding a basic hairline for me to add onto...

Once this was done and I had baked it in the oven I started to add onto the shape of the hair bit by bit. This proved to be the time consuming part; trying to shape little pieces on such a small scale. I started with Paul's head first (below, centre), his hair was a little simpler as the back would stay plain and the front was kind of sticking up in a sort of quiff, trying to do the very thin pieces was very fiddly though. Next up was Rob's head (below, right), I had drawn his hair a little more messed up so I wanted to have bits flicking out here and there, the back wasn't plain either, it has little sections of hair to add a bit more texture to it. Last but not least was Jamie's head (below, left), I had drawn Jamie's hair a little messy and sticking up but pushed to one side, I tried to create this using tiny, thin, rolled pieces of clay, but at the last minute before baking I wussed out and knocked all the ends down as I was worried that they would be too brittle and would break off. So here's how they looked after baking...

So the next job on the list for day two was to start on the lion heads on the two main characters. Again I had already made the basic head shapes and had added the noses. To add the lion headpieces I drew the eyes onto the heads using a pencil to work out where the headpiece could fit around the features and then drew the line for the edge of it. I then rolled a long piece of sculpey and followed the line on the head, blending it as I went...

I continued all the way around the face and then using a wooden tool I tidied the edges around the face. I used the sharpest edge of the tool to make sure I pushed the blended clay under the edge of the mask piece around the face so that it would look like the face was inside the headpiece...

The next step was to build up the clay behind this edge so I added another thinly rolled piece of clay all the way around and blended it in...

The next step is to continue adding to the shape of the head and eventually shape the nose and face of the lion to which all the pieces of fabric will be added to create the mane.