Old Age Sculpt

After the face cast came out it had a lot of issues. It had a lot of holes, bumps and lines from the clay and. There were air bubbles around the areas with hair and the nose had a lot of problems where the nostrils had been not face cast close enough and where I hadn't stuffed the alginate with tissue properly.

This was what the face cast looked like after I had smoothed it out to the state it would have ideally been in. I used photos of my nose to make sure I got the right shape as I had to change it a lot to clear out the extra clay around the nostrils. I used small bits of clay to fill in any holes and smoothed over all the bumps and areas with hair imprints. I mostly used my hands and small amounts of lighter fluid.

The next thing I did to begin the age sculpt was trace on the lines where I wanted the wrinkles to end up. This helped be keep the lines in the right place and follow the natural contours of the face without placing clay. These will eventually become the biggest most distinctive wrinkles

The next thing I did was place pieces of clay where I had drawn the lines. I put quite large chunks of clay in these areas as these would be the heaviest wrinkles. The areas I concentrated most on where the nasolobial folds as these are the most prominent wrinkles in my close family (especially mum and gran) I also made quite strong frown lines around the forehead and jowls around the chin to act like looser skin. Heavy eyebags are another feature which are prominent in my family so I extended my natural ones down my face and out onto the cheeks at the edges

The next thing I did was crosshatch over the entire surface to get out the tool and finger marks in the piece. I began with a big rake tool and went in a crosshatch motion.

I then went down a rake tool half the size to further smooth down the face

After this I went down a smaller tool again. I then went down to a wire/thick brush to smooth one last time and begin to add small bits of texture.

After I had finished smoothing with these tools I began to add texture. I did this by first adding pore texture all around the face in slight oval/dragged out shapes that followed the curves of the face. This is because pores are not fully circular. I then buffed these out with a hard brush and continued to repeat this to overlay pores. Once I was happy with this I lightly went over the entire face with the roughest side of an emery borad to add some very fine skin detail. Again I buffed this out with talcom powder to blend the textures together and sweep off any lumps of clay. I also continuously added fine lines and wrinkles on top of/around where I had created the deep wrinkles. I added crows feet, wrinkles around the lips, fine lines on the forhead and many small interlacing lines underneath the eyes. Again I kept brushing over these with talcum powder to sweep away lumps and soften. To finish off the texture I made a slurry of clay and used a toothbrush to flick this all over the face creating very small raised bumps over the skin surface. I also painted on a few bigger slurry lumps on the nose and chin.

Once I had finished my old age sculpt I was very happy with it. I found the easiest part to be blocking out the maion wrinkles because you could quickly see the shape of the sculpt take form and easily change things around. I found the hardest part adding texture as there had to be so many layers of it and it was difficult to make it look realistic to skin as this is meant to be a very lifelike sculpt. I was very happy with the shapes I put on the face such as the nasolobial folds and the jowl lines as I think they look realistic to the age (60-70) and follow the lines I could clearly see runing ion my family. I think the forehad may be the worst area texture wise as it was difficult to make it look natural on such a flat plane of skin. I also founnd the forehead the hardest to put wrinkles onto as it doesn't have any natural lines to follow unlike other areas of the face. Although I found the texture the hardest thing to do I was very happy with the overall effect on the cheeks as this is where I think it looks the most realistic and where it has the most depth and layers. If I were to do this again I would begin the texture differently by layering different types of texture on top of each other and by using talcom powder all throughout texturing. Overall I am happy with how this sculpt turned out as my first attempt at a full face sculpt and it taught be a lot about working with clay which will be useful in the future.