April Portrait bust Final -Nate

April Portrait bust Challenge Final -Nate

So.. I tried really, Really hard to get this lump of lifeless clay to resemble my Mom.. I failed and what I thought would be an inspiring, uplifting challenge. Instead it Beat me like a side of beef. And what I realized about myself is that I just need more practice.

My mother

This was my reference photo.

My first attempt

My mother’s smile is wonderful, and I wanted to capture that the most in my sculpt. So that's what I started with. It took me a little bit to get the smile to look this good, but it was worth it. Was it perfect? no.. but hey this is my first attempt. it still looked good I tightened the smile up a bit, smoothed out some edges.. Looking good. I was on cloud nine.

Again.. Was it perfect? no.. But again.. It was my first attempt. and it wasn't too shabby.. so I was confident i’m perfecting what i needed to, and make it larger.. like, life-like larger. And I was going to nail it.. it was going to look just like her and all my family would want me to cast it!

What followed was mortifyingly humbling.

what I thought would be wonderful, turned out to be nightmare juice for me and my children. be warned the following images are a tad disturbing.

So, things weren't looking too badly, but in the last picture.. Really look at that smile. Does it look a little creepy to you?  My first attempt smile looks motherly and warm this one looks a little more like it wanted to eat my face off. I admit, maybe I had worked on it too long and I was seeing things. Then I had an idea! What if! I took a picture of what I had created, and put it photo shop! then, take my reference picture place it on top and turn up the opacity?! Then I could see where I was going wrong! I just found a Sculpting Hack!!!  

I could Clearly see that i needed to move the nose to the right, and the smile didn't look to off.. so I started moving the nose around and started to adjust the eyes.

Wow.. you might say.. that escalated quickly. And you would be right. the more I used photo shop to adjust, the worst things got. so it wasn't a usable option anymore. maybe with some tweaking I could get it to work right, but I was running out of time. needless to say, this is what ended up happening to the demon mom.

Funny story about those pictures, as I was failing more and more, I sent some pictures to Aaron. He was at eating someplace and was chuckling at my venting about how terrible the sculpt was going. okay, not much chuckling, but laughing out loud. catching the attention of an older gentlemen, who said. I have to ask.. What is so funny? So Aaron started showing him pictures, when he got to the last one he was like.. whoa.. yes.. it is not going well. Thanks for the laugh.

 So I went and downloaded more pictures. Different angles, Watched some YouTube videos. Re-grounded myself and started over. I didn't take many pictures since that was a disaster and I didn't even want to tempt myself at using Photoshop.. but what’s interesting.. that sculpt ended up looking kinda  like a cousin. thats close right? At least it looks like a family member.. problem is. That cousin is on my dad’s side!

And my sister Karen came over and helped me and things were looking better, then she left. And after some time alone with the sculpt. I totally botched what we did. sigh.. oh well.. but, I will say that i'm not finished. I'm going to keep working on this until I figure out just where i'm going wrong. its it my sizing?  Or am I trying to make it look to 2d? I don't know.. But when I figure it out. I will post it. But for

now. This is how far I am

.

Well I’ll keeping working on it. It will get better. Thanks for reading and for now i’m going to focus on this next months challenge. but i’ll post more as I get closer.
-Nate