Heads

Normally when building my maquettes I like to build the heads after the armature is glued up and padded out. For my two characters heads in this project I decided to use Sculpey, I'd never used it before now so if it would work was a mystery to us all. It turns out to be quite an easy material to work with. Following expert advise I firstly scrunched up pieces of tin foil into small balls, about the size I wanted my heads to be. I then rolled out the Sculpey and covered each of the balls. I shaped and moulded it into the right shapes for my characters faces/ heads, minus their hair, and shoved them in the oven for the required time. When I took them out they looked like this:

When they'd finally cooled down I tried filing/ sanding them down a little to make the surfaces that much smoother. I either didn't do it very well or my files are crap because not really much happened. That's something to think about next time; smooth the surfaces before cooking. 

Using the same kind of technique of tin foil and thin layers I then added the hair and other details before putting them in the oven once more.

The eyebrows and eyes are removable so that I can add some kind of expression when animating. The eyes didn't turn out as round as I'd hoped so don't really spin as they should, so when it comes to moving the eyes I'm going to have to rub out and draw on the pupils each time. Tedious work to say the least.

Once the heads were made then came the best part: painting them. Areas such as the woman's face needed quite a few coats to get the right outcome but overall I'm pleased with how they turned out.

And finally after adding some Plasticine mouth’s I was left with these: