Armature Work

On the 6th Nov, John Stewart-Wood held a workshop on armature making and sculpting, showing us how to make the stands, the tools and materials we should use, aswell as showing us some of his own work for inspiration. In the end I decided to focus on my personal hobby of Warhammer, and sculpt the head of something within this hobby or franchise. I ended up picking my personal favourite within the hobby being that of an Orc, whose heads have smaller tops, big jaws, small eyes and huge bottom teeth, in particular their tusks.
I first drew the orks head from a combination of Orc drawings I saw from 'Warhammer Online''s art book, which held plenty of Orc drawings for influence and inspiration, and ended up giving mine a nose piercing, a broken left tusk and an angry frown which all orcs should carry.
I began the model by making a simple wire skeleton for the piece, which I decided to make a small loop for the flat mid-section of the face, and a big horizontal loop which would support his huge hulking jaw or lower lip.
After applying plenty of chavant clay to the wire skeleton, I eventually got a rough beginning to my Orc head, what I then needed to go on to do is his eyes, brow, teeth, ears and skin texture.
Upon finishing the sculpture, I had finally produced something I was happily with. To reinforce the ears, I used some small pieces of wire as the clay if simply added on would surely fall off from the weight of the clay. I also used this for the orc's teeth, this way I could sculpt the teeth on the pieces of wire, and with a small hook at the end, could easily be placed within the orcs mouth. And finally, after smoothing the skin with lighter fluid with a brush, the piece was finally finished.
Some critical analysis would be perhaps could of stuck to my drawing more closely, perhaps gave him some eyes and the upper part of his head maybe a little bit larger and to scale, but it's quite rarely I'm this happy with a piece of my own work so I'm going to leave it be, and maybe even in my free time create a full body for this head to sit on :) who knows.