I started doing sculpture over the summer and this is my fourth and latest piece. I've been really meaning to get this one done so Everyweeks are a pretty awesome reason to get back to work.

So this week I worked on shaping the skull a bit more and I added some teeth as well. Super happy with how the front row came out and I'm pretty excited to do the rest. Really makes the whole piece look a bit more aggressive and bear like. There's still the bottom jaw to be done and I'm expecting that to be a pain in the ass. Bear skulls are way more complicated than I expected and there's been plenty of times when I wish I could just hold one in my hands for reference. Once the skull itself is done I want to take this piece in a more grotesque direction. Still debating the details there. I want to maintain the strong intimidating bear factor but add a real shock value. Haven't decided on the color scheme for paint yet either.

My process is pretty simple - I find some good reference images on google and then get to work with the clay ( I use sculpey). At first I was doing everything with just my hands and this shitty piece of 18 gauge wire but that ended up really sucking for detail work. So a little while back I bought some actual sculpting tools and that made a world of difference. If the piece requires it ill do a wire frame and then apply clay over that but that wasn't the case for this skull. I'll do a rough shape of whatever is I'm trying to sculpt and then start working on the major details. Then I start bouncing back and forth between major/minor details - at this point if things look terrible I'll usually trash that section and try a different approach. Working with the clay is really relaxing and pretty much exactly like one of those stress balls.

Here's some of my old work: https://www.instagram.com/p/84dOlmBeFS/ https://www.instagram.com/p/6coH1UBeC2/