Trial and errors of Alfred's head! ... Part 1!

With advice from good 'ol Ashleigh Hutchinson, I got to work on Alfred's head. I'd never done anything like this before so let's just call the first one an experiment! 

I began with a ball shape made from tinfoil, rolled out a thin layer of flesh coloured Sculpey clay and then covered it over the foil. Smoothing is tedious and takes a bit of time if you want to completely vanish all of the cracks in the clay. It helps if the Sculpey has been warmed and kneaded in your hands previous to this, or...as I did it...stuck it in front of the heater for a couple of minutes! Once I had a head-looking shape, I put it in the oven at 90c (fan) for 10 minutes. I figured it would be easier to do it this way than to build the whole face up in one go. I didn't want to risk getting one piece of the face perfect, then trying to mould another piece of the face and messing up the first part I did, so this is why I decided to do it in stages. After I baked the first piece, it came out looking like this...

It was very egg shaped and I wanted it to make it look more skull shaped. After all, the head has to have a neck slotted into it so therefore it needed to have some type of skull back to it. This is what this little foil cap is for. I was trying to build upon what I had already. I'd read and been told that Sulpey is very build-able, and yes...it is to a degree but being a little optimistic I expected a flawless join between the two separate parts (which I didn't get) but hey...

I repeated the same process with the chin here - made it from foil, covered it in Sculpey, joined/blended the piece onto the previously baked face and then put it back in the oven at 90c for another 10 minutes to create one shape. 

Next I moulded a nose on. This piece I didn't make from foil, just Sculpey and then I put it back in the oven. 

Once the nose was baked, my next plan was to figure out how to do the eyes. This is where I realised - oops! I should of pressed into the clay to make the eyes deep-set, but at this point the clay had been baked and set hard so I couldn't change it. This is when I knew I'd be making Alfred number 2 and kicked myself for not thinking of this before hand. I should have referred to my drawing! I stuck two little bead eyes on with Blutack just to see what they would look like.

Next, I gave Alfred some eye bags and some ears. These were smoothed on and baked using the same process as the nose. 

After that, I decided it was time to move on to Alfred number 2...