Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey, on total. And in this class you're going to learn how to sculpt a self portrait or a poor creative anyone out of plasticine or anything you like, feel free to choose polymer clay or even fondant icing. Literally anything goes. Just how fun I'm going to be showing you how to break down the complexity of a face as a whole into some simple shapes. How I approach sculpting a face by adding and taking away clay and all of the techniques that I use for the different elements, such as hair, eyes, nose, mouth, and even accessories like clothing or glosses or things like that. I'll be showing you the tools that I use, all of which are really inexpensive, as well as an essential part of sculpting. How to mix your own colors from skin tones to basic color theory. If that sounds like fun, and grab your chosen sculpting material and let's get started.
2. Class Project: So for your class project, if it wasn't obvious already, I would like you to sculpt a self portrait. Choose a picture of yourself that you like and grab some clay of choice. It could be Pleistocene like I'm using, or if you will, to create something a bit more permanent than you might use an oven baked clay, which you can then cook and keep forever. It doesn't matter what you choose to use. I'm intrigued to see how you take what I'm teaching and applying it in your own way. So surprised me, I can't wait to see your lovely little phases in the project gallery. Do make sure to share, share any progress as well. Perhaps you want to document what you're doing. If you have any questions, anything that you're struggling with, let me know and I'll do my best to help. Like I mentioned in the introduction, sculpting a self portrait is not something that you're going to be able to do. 50, ten minutes is likely going to take you a few hours. It's a bit like painting a picture. It's the sort of process where it will go through various stages and you will find that perhaps you have a likeness, then you lose the lightness, and then the lightness comes back. So try not to get disheartened along the way. There is no wrong or right way to sculpted portraits. Every sculptor will approach things differently. This class is going to be based on the way I approach things. If any point you get stuck, perhaps you have a difficult texture or a difficult accessory or new portrait. Feel free to start a discussion tab and I will get back to you as soon as I can with my thoughts and advice, as well as this option, I've decided to keep expanding this class. What do I mean by this? Well, if you are having a particular problem with your portrait and perhaps you'd like to see how I approach things in a visual way. Then leave a review on this class giving me some feedback. Ema we a picture of yourself. And if you're lucky, I will sculpt here and add a new video lesson tennis class. There's no limit to how many of these I will do is all dependent on my availability. And how interesting I think your problem is. How much I think that showing how I approach things that would help other people. So feel free to do that if you want. Obviously, you're giving me permission to use a picture of yourself in the class and to create a likeness of you out of clay. Hopefully, this will add more value to the class and I will post out notifications as and when these new lessons appear. So, you know, and then you can come check them out if you've sent me a picture or if you're just interested in how I approach a different phase. So let's recap. Find a decent picture of yourself or the person that you want to scoped sculpture portraying him plasticine or clay, and upload your wonderful ought to the project and resources tab up next, I'll be showing you the tools that I use on other essential items as well.
3. Tools: There are lots of coins of different tools that are good to have when you're sculpting with plasticine. You can see that I've got quite a variety laid out here. These blue ones are actually cake decorating tools that are designed for fondant icing. And whereas these silver ones are branded as dental tools, for dentists, they're made of metal. They're really strong and they're actually really cheap. I'll put a link to them in the class information so you can get some yourself back. Truly the most common tools that I use, an ordinary pair of scissors. You'll have a pair of scissors somewhere lying at home, and these are really, really useful. Another of my favorite tools is a pin, and you can use any kind of pin from any sewing kit. I'll use T pins, which looked like this because the t at the end gives you more grip. You've got more to hold onto. Its easier to control. And my other favorite tool is out of the dentistry kids. It's this sort of smooth, round but flat ended tool. I like this for pushing down on things. So when I do the eyes and create the pupil and the iris, I make it into a ball of clay and I pushed down with this and it flattens out really nicely. This tool with round ball ends is also a really good one to have because when you are smoothing down the claim, sometimes you think these are a bit big and clunky and using a little bold tool like this can be good to just get in there and just move things down. But if you don't have one, don't worry because you can use the rounded end of a t pen or a normal pin in the same way. So really simple, easy, and inexpensive tools here. Other tools though that you may not have thought of when you are mixing different clays. Bits gets stuck to your hands, your hands get grubby. And if you're changing between colors, you will make lighter colors dotty. And this can be really annoying. Now the tool that you won't hear, oh, baby wipes, you can use any brand. But I've got this classic brown hair and they are amazing for cleaning your hands up or when you're handling clay, they even better than soap and water. And you can just use one and have it there for an entire sculpting session and just use it over and over. You see my hands, you can see a few little bits of blue on my hands, but they don't look incredibly grubby here. But if I wipe my hands with this wet wipe, you're going to see just how much clay is on my hands by how blue this baby white is getting. There's a surprising amount of clay. So if you are handling colors like green, black, brown, blue, make sure that you've got some way to clean your hands by your desk before you handle a light color like yellow or white. Another thing that I like to use which helps keep your keep your clay and your desk clean, is baking parchment. So this is a sort of stuff you might learn a tray width to bake in the oven. You can easily cut a piece off and you don't need a lot. But if you put this down on your desk and then you sculpt onto it, he can easily move your sculpt around. Clays, not going to get stuck to the table and you just keep your area nice and clean. I find it works really well. And you could usually reuse the piece several times over. So it's quite efficient to don't chuck it away off to one use to10 overuse the other side. It's just really helpful for keeping things neat and tidy. So let's recap. The best tools are the basic ones. Baby wipes or your new best friend for keeping clean and baking parchment is ideal to work on to our next, I'll be talking about clay kinda mixing and how desired results are not always as expected.
4. Basic Colour Theory: So the three primary colors, blue, yellow, and red. And from these three colors, we can mix secondary colors. Secondary colors are orange. Orange can be made by mixing red and yellow together. And then we have purple, which can be made by mixing red and blue, and green, which can be made by mixing blue and yellow. Now these three colors that you see, the secondary colors have come straight out of the packet. I haven't premixed these. So now I'm going to show you what mixing these primary colors together does, because the result likely won't be what you are expecting. So let's start by mixing the red and the yellow together to try and achieve orange. You can see that we arrive at an orange color, but it's not as bright as the oranges come straight out. The packet is a bit of a DLA, DACA orange. Now that might be okay for some applications. But if you want a nice bright orange, you're probably not going to reach that color by mixing red and yellow together equally. Hey, we've got blue and yellow now to mix these together, we should arrive at green. You'll notice that we have exactly the same issue. We do get a green, but it's quite dark and muddy. Now when you are handling dot colleagues, it's important to clean your hands in between gay baby wipes out the ready and just keep the hands of white before you mix the next set of colors. Now we're going to mix the red and blue together. And this time we're hoping to end up with purple. And you can see that the result, hey, is the worst out the three, we really have got a very muddy, messy. He collides almost black is disgusting. One way to try and improve these colors is to add a bit of white. You see that when we add white to this mucky looking purple is just going to make it a slightly lighter, mucky looking purple. There is no way of mixing colors to achieve that same bright purple that's come straight out of a packet. But why is this? Well, these colors that we see, the primary colors then all as pure as they might look at that red color has got some yellow in it. And the blue might have a little bit of red. So they're not pure colors. This is just how clays come. You can get clays in all different shapes. And that is why when you mix them, they don't give the result that you're expecting because you're essentially mixing elements of all three primary colors together even though you're just using two, because within the color, there are elements of a different primary color. So the only way to get these pure secondary colors and other colors is to buy them as extra colors of clay. My favorite brand of plasticine to work where there's plaster. Lena, I love this clay because it's soft and, and easy to mold. It's also just call a lovely texture. It's a sort of oily, waxy clay and you can buy it in lots of different varieties of size. You can get these really thin little sticks. And you can get these bigger brick like blocks as well. And these packs are great because you get a little bit of lots of different colors. If you are able to afford a big box, I suggest getting a box like this. You get two packets of each individual color and get perfect vibrant secondary colors. You've got your purple, you orange, annual green, as well as some really useful flesh tones for helping you to achieve your skin tightens and you get multiple yellows, multiple greens are multiple blues. Having the lighter yellow is really helpful in skin tones as well. Plus you get to whites and blacks, and whites and blacks are really good if you want to lighten and darken any colors that you are mixing. So how you recommend that you get a pack of plasticine that has a really nice wide range of colors within it, because mixing your colors together can be a bit muddy. So let's recap. Not all primary colors appear. Colors mixing them together can make mud. Your best bet is to buy a variety pack with many different pre-made colors. Up next, I'll be showing you how to mix different skin tones. And don't worry, this kind of color mixing work citrate.
5. Mixing Skin Tones: So these colors on screen are generally the colors you're going to need to mix. Any skin tone that you can imagine. Go black, brown, white, any flesh tones. You've got pinks, some yellow and a red as well. And I'm going to show you how I would approach making three different skin tones, three different ethnicities. So I'm going to go for a Caucasian white. Then I'm going to go for more of an Asian skin tone and then also a medium black skin tone. And you can quite easily change these mixes by adding a bit more brown or black or white to them. For the first skin tone, Caucasian, I'm using a mixture of the flesh color that I've got with yellow, white, and red. You want to have quite a good amount of white and a good amount of yellow here, as well as a little dash of red just to warm up. Now, for a more Asian skin tone, I'm going to use a brown color as the base. And then I'm going to add yellow and white. And then for a black skin tight and I'm going to be using brown is the base with some black and a tiny, tiny bit of red just to warm it up. Now, depending on how black you want to go, is a case of mixing in more black to the mix or equally if you want to go the other way and have a lighter brown it, putting less black. You can even add in white to lighten things up. So this is my Caucasian mix. This is using a flash or pink color. If you have one with white, yellow, and a tiny bit of red. Once we've got to the point where it's all combined and mixed. We can then look at that color and look our portray and decide if it's the right shade for that skin tone on very pale. So for me it would be adding more white to make it more pale. But you may find that yours looks a little bit too pink, in which case you might want to add more yellow. Or if it's looking a little bit too yellow, then you might want to add in a little bit more red just to warm it up and take that yellowness out. I'm quite happy that that looks like your average caucasian skin tones. Now I'm going to move on to mix up the more Asian skin tone. And this is the mix of brown, yellow, and white. And again, when this has combined, you want to look at that skin tone, look at your picture and think, does it match well enough? Is it correct or is that something a bit off? You may find with an Asian skin tone that you need to add a little bit more brown or a little bit more yellow, or in some cases it might be a little bit more white. Everything is trial and error when you're mixing colors, just remember that you can always add more, but you can't take away. So if you're going to add a bit more to a mixture, less is always more. Go with a small amount first, combine the end and then look at your mixture again and decide, is it right? Is it not right? And then go from there. The more you mix clays yourself, the more you get used to the brand of clay you're using, the more you will understand and be able to mix the colors you want quicker. And finally, I'm going to mix up that brown skin tone. So this is the black brown and the red. And like I say, if you want it darker, add a bit more black. If you want to lighter, either add a bit more brown or bit of white and that will lighten things up. But mixing skin tones isn't as challenging as you might think. And actually, once you've tried it, you'll realize that it's quite easy. So don't be afraid of mixing your own skin tone. It actually works quite well with mixing clays for this, no, like with the primary colors and secondary colors, mixing skin tones with clays is generally quite fine. And if you're following these color mixes, you should get similar results to me. You can use similar approaches when you're mixing hat color as well. If you want to blend generally, bit of yellow with white will get you there. And with Brown's, it could be mixing brown with black or brown with white to get different shades. Ginger hair, a bit of red with a yellow and a bit of brown. Just take your time and smooth bits until you arrive at the color that you're looking for. So let's recap. You can make any skin tone. If you have white, yellow, red, pink, brown, and black clay for Caucasian, you will need white, yellow, and pink. For Asian, you will need what? Yellow and brown and full brown or black, you will need brown, black and a little red mixed. I'll be showing you how to isolate a key face shape and make a base to gradually build up from.
6. Face: When scopes in you portrayed the first thing you want to observe is your skin tone. And you're going to want to mix your colors just like I've shown you in the previous lesson. You can see that in my reference picture of myself, my skin tone is very fat. I have very light skin, so I'm going to be using quite low white as well as a bit of pink and some yellow to try and achieve the very pale skin that I have. So I'm going to mix that together first and make enough up to sculpt my whole face. So we've actually realized that it's not quite right. It needs to be even paler and also a bit more pink at the moment that the skin tones a bit too yellow, you can see that there's a little bit of a rosy genus in my face. I've added some pink and white to this mix and I'm going to mix that in and hopefully then I will have the skin tone that I'm looking for. So yeah, now I'm quite happy with that color. So the next thing that you wanna do when making your portray is you want to look at the main shape of your face. So you can see that my face looks little bit like an upside down egg. It's wider at the top and narrow at the bottom. So we're gonna take a chunk of clay off and we're going to make a shape that is roughly that shape. Whatever shape is that you see that your head is, your head might mean more round, it might be more square. But make a base piece of clay that we're going to build up on the whole process we've sculpting something is adding and taking away clay. So we're going to be isolating different shapes in the face and gradually building up from this base piece, you'll notice that I'm using my thumb to smooth down the clay. So if you have any rough edges or any imperfections, just Rabbet it with your thumb or finger. This will warm the clay and soften it and you'll get a nice, smooth look. You want things to look nice and neat and tidy. So do this whenever you can. I'm quite happy with the shape that I've got. I'm not worrying too much about the funny shape of my chin. It's all goes in and out of bed. The sides all figured that out later on. At the moment, I just want a base shape that I can build upon that roughly there. So the next shapes that I'm picking out or either side of my face, you'll see that they are slightly more elevated, not as high as my actual cheeks. They're a bit more fleshy by the sides. There are these soils flags, I guess you would say the sides of the face. So I'm just adding those on with extra clay. The next shape that I'm isolating, It's a little bit hard to see because of all the hat, but I'm choosing to isolate my forehead. So I'm kind of making ox around where the eyes are going to sit and it's going to join up with the nose. So I'm making a slightly lower part in the middle, which is going to be where the nose is going to attach and everybody's forehead sticks out a little bit further you I said bit further back in your head. So this is bringing the forehead forward and you will see as we go on that we're going to start making these little indented areas where the isaac and ago. So they can see I've got my forehead now I'm going to make a nose. Now. You don't always want to add your nose early on because it'll be smoothing clay down around the area and sometimes it can be annoying having the nose that, but it's good to put the nose in just for positioning purposes so that you get other things in the right place. So I'm going to just put a placeholder nose in the middle to get a feel for how the face is looking as a whole. And now all these pieces and down, I'm going to move these down with my finger. So we've got a much more blended sculpt and things are looking a bit more neat and tidy. You can always go in with that rounded tool if you have one, like I mentioned in the tool lesson, if your fingers too big to smooth down the clay, this would can really help to soften any harsh edges. And then you can just go in there with your fingers lightly and smooth things off. You can see that I've lifted up the nose because he knows had got in the way. We can always pull the nose back down. The nice thing about plasticine is really flexible and is quite easy to correct and change. So now that that initial Biscop things done, I'm now going to focus on my cheek area on the bottom edge of the eyes. So I'm going to create this sort of curved top edge, which is going to be where the eye sockets are. And I'm gonna make a little cub depend for each I and this will sit and we'll create those shapes. I was saying about where we're going to put the eyes. And I'm also, you can see that my cheeks are quite pronounced, that quite a bit of shadow underneath and the shape to them. So I'm going to be trying to create that shape out of this piece of clay. And that should start really giving my face a bit of form and making things start to come together. Like I say, I like this isn't going to come straight away and you may even find that you have a likeness. And through the process of sculpting, you lose it for a while and then it comes back. But you essentially observing, That's the key thing. Isolating shapes, simplifying your face. Looking at the shapes within the face, but not the face as a whole. Because looking at the face, I have a whole can be overwhelming. You adding clay on and if any point you feel like keep adding too much. You can always use the pin to slice some off and thin it down. I'm placing this piece underneath the nose. So I'm going to lift the nose up again, put this down, and then I'm going to cut out the middle section and then put the nose down on top. You can choose whichever method works best for you. This is just a method that I've decided to do on this particular Skulpt. And then when that's all down, you want to smooth it again. You have any excess clay they don't want again, you can take that way it with the pen tool. I've decided that the last thing I want to do at this point before I start sculpting my eyes is to just need to the lower part of the face. So the chin area, I feel like nice currently a little bit too low is sitting back a little bit too much. So I'm going to create a shape of clay to fill that area and place that beneath the nose and cheeks for the lower part of the face, just a flat piece of clay. I'm gonna just scope bow and then smooth it down with my fingers. And then we're gonna move on to how I approach creating the eyes in the next lesson. So let's recap. Doesn't think if you'll face as a whole, instead, break it down into simple shapes. Building up the shapes and layers slowly gives you room to correct as you go up next, I'll be showing you how to build your eyes from the whites all the way up to the lids.
7. Eyes: For the eyes, we're going to be building them up and adding flesh colored clay on top to disguise them. So we're going to start with the white clay and we're gonna make the whites of the eye. So you want to position this in the correct place where your eyes are in your face. And these can be, like I say, a bit bigger than they need to be because we're going to cover over the edges, we're going to build the eye up from the bottom up. So don't worry about the precise shape of the why of the eye, if anything, go a little bit bigger than you think you need because we're going to be covering that Oba anyway. If you feel like you've put down too much white clay and it's too sick and maybe it sits up to you fall. You can always scrape some of two using the pin. Now after you've got the whites of your eyes down, you want to next mix a iris color so that's the colored part of your eye. You can see in my reference image to see that my eyes are quite light blue. So I'm gonna take a blue color and I'm going to add some white to it to make it even lighter. Once you've mixed this, you're gonna make some small bowls, make them smaller in diameter than your iris because we're going to actually push them down to spread them out and flatten them. So then I have really quite small balls of clay here. If you struggling to place them with your fingers, get you pin tool and use that to nudge them into the correct position. Now we're going to take tau the told the dentistry told the highlight with this small flat and which is great for pushing down and flattening smooth shapes like base. So I'm going to very carefully apply pressure evenly onto the iris of the eye. And I'm going to flatten it down to create a perfect circle. And when you do this, you may find the one is slightly bigger than the other. If that happens, you can always add a little bit more clay to the one that's smaller and then flatten that down until it reaches the same size. The key here is observation and adding and taking away that is the process. So looking at the shapes, making sure that correct if they're not adjusting and then moving forward next, I'm going to add the people. So this is even smaller little balls of clay, but this time we're going with black for the people as the hole in the middle of your eye. And because these are so tiny, I am going to get this into position with my pin. So I'm just sticking that to the end very carefully on the tip of the pin and then I'm just moving it into position in the center of the eye. And then I'm just going to use exactly the same process. I'm going to use the flat dentistry tool to just apply a bit of pressure and flatten out that people so that it spreads out and is flat and the eye. And if you find that when people was a little bit bigger or smaller than the other, then again, you can try very carefully adding a small amount more clay to the smaller one and flattening now on to get them more equal. Do be careful though, because black is such a problematic color when you're using plasticine, if you get it in the wrong place, it can be a nightmare because it will stay in the other colors. You can always reposition the clay with the pin. And if you have had an absolute nightmare and you're not happy, you can either take the entire iris and pupil, all four, you can just scrape the pupil off and stock and there's nothing wrong with that. There's no wrong or right way. And you want things to look right. So if it's not correct, then I highly advise you to try and get it the best you can once you've gotten to this stage where you've actually got your eyes on your sculpt, you look completely startled because your eyes wide open and completely round, which is not, not for a tool. We're now going to look at the shapes around the eyes in the reference picture. So the eyelids and the lower back area underneath the eye where the skin folds. We're going to look at those shapes and we're going to sculpt little tiny pieces of flesh colored clay and just position those on top to basically build that eye shape and try and get that as correct as possible. And we're not, this isn't going to be the final layer. This is sort of a intermediate layer on the eyes. So we're going to just be trying to get the shape roughly right. But we will put a final layer on top of that will be a bit neat as well. Once you've got a shape created all the way around, you've outlined the eyes completely with flesh clay. You then wanted to just smooth this down like we've been doing the whole way through. Sometimes once you've got the eyes down like this and you've put a bit of clay around, you realized that the forehead now isn't sticking forward as much as it needs to. So you might want to do while I'm doing and add another piece of clay onto the forehead to just bring that forward a little bit more. So I don't know, adding a lot of clay here, just a thin piece just to give me a slightly stronger brow line. And then when this is on, everything is going to get smooth down just like we've been doing the hallways for you. So I'm going to smooth down the new forehead and I'm going to smooth down all those little bits around the eyes the best we can. If you finding that your fingers are a bit too big to do this, you can always go in there with that round head TO orbit the end of your PIN as well. I'm just doing a few other minor corrections to the face. I've decided that There's a little bit too much clay on the lower part, the face. I'm going to scrape that off and I'm just gonna do a few corrections to the nose before I actually finalize the eyes. So I'm just scraping off a bit of clay here just to flatten out the mouth area. And I'm also going to just slightly tweak for nose shape the sides off a little bit using the pin. When you're using the pin like this, be careful because if you cut too deeply, it can be hard to smooth that down and also just be mindful of the direction that you're moving the clay again because you won't have a nice finished smooth look. And if you're pushing the clay somewhere where it's hard to get your finger in is going to be hard to smooth that down. I'm also going to be doing a lesson much later in this class about how to aesthetically improve your sculpt digitally in the computer. Because depending on how you want to use, you ought, you may want to digitize it and make it a profile picture on your central media. Or you may want to make a digital COD or post or something out of it. And all the little imperfections that are left at the DOE mocks in the clay that you don't like. You can actually clean them up digitally. So I'm going to show you how to do that as well. But now we're going to finish off the eyes. So now I'm really focusing on the shapes of my eyes. The arches at the top of the eye and the cheese at the bottom of the eye. And this is going to slightly over hang the iris and the pupil. So now that's not going to be completely round and kinda look less wide-eyed and more natural and try and get this shape as accurate as possible. So you'll notice when you're observing your eyes that that aka OC is much more rounded than the lower leg on some people, the lower edge of the eyes is even quite straight. There's normally a little bit of curvature at each end. So we're going to create these upper box first and then we're going to make the logs join at the corners. And then again, as always, will be smoothing down this clay to get a nice, neat finish. Feel free to go in there with the opinion as well to cut away any clay that you feel is unnecessary. I've made the bags under my eyes slightly larger than they needed to pay, um, well, actually that tie it. So I'm going to just cut away a little bit about clay that then smooth it down. And you can sort of see that there's little bit of me coming through. The eyes are looking much more correct now. And so now in the next lesson, we're going to be working on the mouth. So let's recap. Take you time. Usual pin tool for placing tiny parts more easily and don't worry too much about being perfect until that top flesh layer. Next, I'll be making my mouth and showing you how it's done.
8. Mouth: Now Malik's challenging and any awful and open mouths are probably the hardest to get, right? So I've not made my life very easy HD, but it'll be a good demonstration to show you how I approach things. So first of all, before I even start sculpting and mixing colors for the mouth, I want to make sure that the lower part of the face is definitely correct. I want this to be as accurate as possible because once you've put the mouth on, you can't really easily change that skin color beneath is going to be much harder to do. So actually the mouth is probably something you might scoped early on to get right, but you may not want to actually fix it down onto your sculpt straight away, put it to one side and then perhaps leave that one as the last things to add on. So you can see here I've scraped away a bit of clay to smooth down the dough pop face, and now I'm using my thumb to just smooth that down as well. I've also decided here that Minos is a little bit too long, so I'm just shaving a little bit off the end of my nose there with the pin, give myself a nose job. So yeah, it's never too late to make a change to an aspect of the face. If you suddenly look and you think, oh, actually my nose is a bit wrong, change it, fix it. Another good tip if you're struggling or you're getting frustrated is to just step away and then come back and have a look. And sometimes you'll notice something that was just staring you right in the face, quite literally that you didn't see before. And then you can solve the mystery and get your likeness more correct. Once you're happy with that lower area, you want to start mixing the colors for your mouth or you're going to need really is a teeth color that can be white or you can make it off white and a lip color. My lips in this picture are quite pink, so I'm using a quite pink clay and I'm going to add a bit of white to it just to meet it down slightly. When process for doing Mao's is to focus on the bottom lip first stash generally the thicker lip, it's very red if someone's got a thicker upper lip. And so if you get the shape and the thickness of that right first, then you can work the rest of the mouth from there. We can put a piece of white clay above it for the teeth. And then we can add the upper lip on top for the teeth. We want to have a thin section of clay. You can see I've just got 19 of TPP showing. And we're going to just create a flat piece of clay here. And I'm going to actually use my scissors to cut it into shape because asking Luisa 0. And we've just been handling the pink clay wood now going to handle white. Remember to clean your hands, gave baby wipe out. Clean your hands between colors because otherwise you're going to make your white clay pink and then you're going to be really annoyed. So he, I'm making my white clay into quite a flat rectangular piece and then I'm going to refine it with my scissors because it's easier to get a nice straight edges and I'm just going to cut to the shape I need for the teeth. And then before I attach the tif to that bottom bit, I'm going to use my Pen Tool to just put some slight indentations just to show a suggestion of teeth is much easier to do this before you attach it to the lip. So do that first. The easiest way to do this to make sure is even is to start with making an indentation in the middle and then halfway from the middle to the end, and the same on the other side. And then you'll have equally spaced teeth. When you're happy with your toothpaste, you want to place that lower lip on top, so on top of the T and try and get that bottom lip to match the shape of on your reference picture. You can see that I barely have a top lip at all. There's literally nothing that, but I'm going to put a suggestion of pink. I'm going to probably exaggerate slightly just cuz making a strip of clay that then is going to be quite a challenge. So I'm gonna go as thin as I can and just place the upper lip on top. And then I'll refine the corners of the mouth and try and get this shape as accurate as I can. So I'm just going to try my mouth on place on my sculpt and I'm thinking that my lips a little bit fat, so I'm going to use the pin to very carefully slice it. They often try and flatten down that lower lip. And then I'm going to try it back in place and I think that's sort of looking okay. Perhaps the corners of the mouth could be TEN, slightly more upwards and the shapes a little bit long that but I'm not going to worry too much about that in a moment. I'm going to squeeze the corners and try and make that the best I can. And then having put the mouth on the face of now notice some other changes that I want to make to the skin behind the mouth. Like I said, you probably aren't going to want to attach your mouth down straight away because, you know, you will make sure that Baskin behind his perfect first and I think that my chin needs to stick out a bit more. So I've scraped some clay down to give myself a little bit more of a sticky out chin. And then I'm just flattening off the area where the mouth would go above the chin to exaggerate the chin a bit more as well. And then I'm pretty happy with that for now. I think things are looking. Okay. So I'm going to move on and I'm going to work on the hand next. So let's recap. Bottom lip first. Clean your hands before handling the white and don't stick your mouth onto the face just yet. Next, things are getting Harry, starting with eyebrows and then had had
9. Hair: I've included eyebrows as, I mean, they all made of half truths. The next thing that I'm going to be doing is making the eyebrows. I've mixed a slightly custom color here. I make some brown with a little bit of white to create and light brown. And I'm just scope Ting eyebrows into the right shape for my eyebrows and then placing those above the eyes in the correct position before I start working on the main hat, I feel like this is the right way to do things because the eyebrows can really help make your face make sense and make it look more like you, hey, I browse in the right place and it asks the right shape. And that can really be a point where you start seeing a bit more of a likeness. Once you're happy with your eyebrow placement, you can smooth down some clay around the eyebrows if you want to. You can even place the mouth back home and see how things and not looking with the mouth, I'm the eyebrows. Is that looking more like you? Are you happy? Are you noticing anything else that is wrong? Anything that perhaps doesn't look quite right. I will be texturing the eyebrows as well, which I'll show you a little bit later. But for now I'm going to leave them playing. I've noticed haven't put the eyebrows on, did I'm still not happy with the flesh underneath the eyes. I think there's a little bit too much back there still. So I'm just going to scrape a little bill valve at this point. And I'm going to scrape a little bit off on the other side as well, just smooth it down a bit. And I think that's going to look a little bit better and I'll use my thumb to smooth things down as well. Be careful. I just tossed my mouth onto the table and now he's dangerous, you know, I could have squashed out there. Luckily I didn't. But do be careful with your scopes and make sure that you keep your work area clean so that you don't get dark bits of clay sticking to light bits of clay and things like that. And I'm also noticing that there's a definition on my nose that I had missed out. I have solved like the end of the nose, I have some shaping and obviously my nostrils, so I'm just putting that detail in as well while I'm here, I might as well, I'm Ben, I'm going to move on to my actual head hat. So when you adding you have, you'll probably going to be mixing a custom color. Again, my hair is very fat in this as well. I have chosen to use a mix of quite a lot of white with a little bit of yellow and a little bit too brown. And you can see I have got this platinum blonde color. And the way that I do is again, look at the shapes that your hand makes. Don't look at the shape as a whole because that can be overwhelming, but instead just breakdown sections. So perhaps look at the sides, hey, acids, the side of the head and just build up the hat in pause, this is going to add texture to your hat, which is good because you're going to be layering up different pieces. You're going to get variety in the heights of different positive you have, which is going to look much more natural. So we're going to piece the hat together in bits, starting but decides, and then looking at the shape on top. And when you go All of the head down, if you're not happy with the shape as a whole, you can always use your pin to just refine things at the edges as well, as well as the larger shakes to actually make this sort of body of the shape of the head, you may want to make some thinness sausages to add strands of hair and a bit more texture. This will depend on your own hand and the hand style. If you had curly hair, you may want to make some wiggly sausages or like twist them to make ringlets is all going to depend on your house specifically, for my head, it's a bit shaggy, looks a bit like a mop, so I'm just adding on these. So Cgb is to add some texture and just make it less flat. But again, this is all an aesthetic choice. You may want to look flat. So it's up to you how you want to layer things, arpanet, the hat, but lots of little pieces to add texture works really well. I'm going to add some more detail to this with the pin to that. When you've got most of your hair in place, you may be thinking, Oh, hang on a minute, I've missed and EIA, I need to put my air and none on some portraits you'll be able to see both is depends how your head is tilted, whether you're looking forwards or two and angle on my reference picture you can anybody see one of my ears. So I'm just going to be put in 18 in full that just put in a little bit of flesh color in an S-shape and try and get it to look like your reference image. So if you've got ahead and over Hangzhou air, then make sure that there's some hair covering the air as well. If you've already got where you are in, needs to go take that big hat off, put the air in and then lay the head back home top. And when you have P wave you had, you could put your mouth back in, you know, just to get a feel for that. The face is a whole. But now we're going to texture the hat. So to do this, it's very easy. I use the pin and I basically just scratch indented line. So I'm just creating little hes. I'm going to do this on the eyebrows Fest. And then I'm just gonna do this all over the head. So squashed down some of those sociology shapes and scratching all these little lines just to show texture and to give the illusion that there are lots of different strands have had that take your time. There's no need to rush. You don't have to be too careful because hair is quite irregular and to make things look natural whenever a symmetrical or anything. So just go crazy and just slash laser loins into it, make it a really hairy again, depending on new actual hostile. I mean, you a hand may be very neat and you picture in which case, try and make the lines follow the reference paycheck and aligned with how your hat is. If you has curly, maybe you want to use to pin tool to make more swirly shapes rather than straight lines. So apply what I'm saying too. Whatever works best for your face. So now that all of my high as textured, I've decided that the actual outline shape of the head is not quite correct. So I'm just using the pin to just slice a little bit off the top and just roughen up the edge lightly because it was just a little bit too rounded and it didn't quite look right. So I'm just taking a few little nicks out and making that outline look a little bit more natural. So let's recap eyebrows fast. Then break your head down into simpler shapes and layer up texture. But the Pinto up next, I'll be tackling the deadliest of accessories, glosses.
10. Glasses: Okay, This is definitely one of the more challenging accessories that you would likely want to scope. Glasses. They are tricky because we were working on such a small scale, we're going to have to row quiet thin sausage it to make the glasses. In fact, it's probably not even possible to Lola sausage thin enough to make the glosses to scale some people in this scenario, my opt for wire and making the glass is out wire instead, I wanted to just stick with clay. So I'm just going to make a slightly thicker frame for my glasses. Well, I've done here because my gloss is a tortoise shell, a mixture of colors. I've mixed some orange with some brown, and I've not completely mixed together. So there's still a little bit of variation in the color. And I'm going to roll this into a thin strip of clay and then try and shape it to look like bagasse is on my face. I'm gonna do this in pieces. I'm going to make the nose bridge first and then I'm going to create circular shaped pieces for each eye, where each lens would go. And then I'm going to create little tiny bits to add on at the sides for the arms, I suggest unless you're brave to choose at your face without glosses, all opt for doing your glasses with wire. Working with polymer clay, it might be slightly easier because that is a bit firmer. Plasticine is very soft. Be no, don't be put off by something being a challenge. I am giving a go. I'm making some lens shapes, one feet dry, and then I've got the nose bridge, which I've separately, I'm going to attach that in the middle. Then I'm going to make some little bits for the arms at the sides as well. And if you are planning to digitize your scope, so bring it into the computer and perfect things afterwards, we can neaten up any imperfections in the frames at that point. Because it's going to be really challenging to smooth these down neatly and not damaged aphasia underneath. So if you've got little joins, happy with, we can get rid of those when we take a photograph of ah, sculpture and bring it into the computer. And you can do all of that in Photoshop with some pretty simple tools. So anybody watching this at any skill level with Photoshop should be able to do that. Now I'm happy with my glasses shape. I'm just joining moving clay to join the nose bridge to the lens pieces. Just using the pin here to just pull a bit of clay across to make sure that it is held to give it the best it can be. And then I'm going to place them on my face and see how things look. See they don't look too bad. I think they actually look quite good. I don't think it matters that they are a bit chunkier found the real glosses. You can essentially do a bit of a caricature job when you're sculpting yourself, if things is slightly exaggerated, I don't think it matters at all. So I'm pretty happy with that. But having looked at the glosses on my face, I've noticed a few little details I want to add in the next lesson, I'm going to tell you what those extra details all, and I'm going to be adding those on to just finish off this face. So let's recap. Go slow and don't worry about small imperfections. We can clean things up digitally at the end. Next, some extra details in the form of eyeliner and hemorrhage.
11. Extra Details: So having looked at my face with the glosses on, I've decided that this a few little things that I want to add that I think we'll just make it look a little bit more. Me in this specific photo of me, I'm wearing black eyeliner, so there's a little bit of an outline around the shape of my eye and I feel like adding on a little bit of dark clay would really just add that extra little detail that I think will make a big difference. So I'm rolling some black clay is thinly as I can into like literally a hair thin strip, really, really thin. And because it's so thin, I'm going to place it down with my pin. Be very, very careful because if you position this in the wrong place is going to be a nightmare to try and get off. So I'm going to be very gentle and just get it into the right position and then I'm going to lightly push it down and then just leave it that because see, I'm just putting this black at the bottom part way along. And I'm going to place the glosses back on top to see how things are looking. Now I think that has improved things, but there's more that can be done. I'm not happy with the hair. I think it's too much one color in my photograph, there's a bit of regrown. If you've got some dark hash I am for you underneath. So I'm now going to add on some bits of dark brown. I'm going to mix a bit of the brown I used for the eyebrows with a bit of black to just make it a bit darker. And I'm going to add some stones if they sum to the hand. And then I'm going to add some strands of blonde on top as well. And then I'm going to use the pen to create I had texture and blend the Olin. I think this is going to make my hair look a bit more accurate to the picture. So you see I just put in Lozi strikes on with the pin trying to blend the blonde with the brown. And just add a little bit of texture, difference, color difference, just to make it not just one block of color. Hair is rarely a one-color. There are lots of different kinds in people's hands. And I just felt like because in this particular picture is a bit of regrowth, this would make it look a bit more accurate to that page and hopefully a bit more like me. So I'm quite happy with that. I think that's looking better, but I do also want to put this eyeliner on the top lids of my eyes. I think that's really gonna make my eyes Pope and make them look a little bit more accurate. So I wrote some very, very thin strips of black plasticine again, and I'm using my pin to very day then. And I'm using my pin to very delicately and carefully get those in place along the edge of my eye line. And then I'm just going to place my mouth back onto my sculpture as well. Try and get that in the right place. You can see that I've squeezed the corners up a bit loose, a little bit too Smiley now, so I need to just tone that down a little bit. I look a little bit crazy at the moment, so I'm just going to make that smile a little bit less extreme. And I'm also going to just slightly changed the shape of my chin because I have these funny little bits where the shape of my chin just goes in and out. I didn't know what was going on, but it's not as flat as I had it. So I'm just adding a bit of clay here to the chin to just try and make that look a bit more accurate to my picture. Then I'm going to put my glasses back on and see how I look and just get those into the right position. I do think that looks a bit more correct. I think the eyeliner has really helped and I think having a bit of difference in color in the hair has helped to. So I'm pretty pleased with how that's looking. So let's recap. Really look at yourself and see if there is anything more that you can add to things like eyeliner. Again, the pin tool as your friend. Next, I'll be looking at clothing and showing you a couple of different approaches.
12. Clothing: You can see in my reference picture that I'm wearing a blue camouflage shut. So there are multiple shades of blue head. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to mix two different blues. I'm going to have a master blue, which is going to be a slightly darker color. And then I'm going to make a derivative color from that, which is a bit lighter. So first of all, I'm going to mix my main blue. I'm going to mix a dark blue and light blue and some black together and hopefully achieve more of a navy blue hair. I'm quite happy with that as the main blue, so I've just pulled a bit of that off and now I'm going to make a secondary blue, which is a little bit lighter. And I'm going to use this to make that camouflage pattern on my shirt. So to make it lighter, I'm going to add some more of the light blue and also some more white. And this should look like a lighter shade of the original blue that I just mixed. So they can see I've got my two different shades of blue. So I've decided I want my lighter blue, little bit lighter, so I'm going to add a little bit extra white to it. But now I'm happy with the two different colors. I'm going to start sculpting the T-Shirts. And I'm going to use the exact same approach we did with the face. So remember we started off by looking at the shape of my head and we made a base. I'm looking at the shape of the shot and I'm breaking it down into different parts. So I'm looking at the angles my shoulder make, and also the width of my shoulders and the where my neck is. So I am essentially trying to make those angled shoulders in this first piece of clay. And then I'm pulling the clay down with some flattening out. And so this is the first part of the shape that we're going to build upon. Using my finger again to just smooth things out, dragging the clay across the heat from my finger motif and just moving it down. So I'm going to place that down. You can see that this shape is sort of that. We've got the sloping of the shoulders. It's not perfect yet. I'm now going to use my trusty deepen my favorite tool I did tell you. And I'm going to refine that this shape by just cutting with the pin. So I'm just going to hope the clay down and I'm going to try and get that shoulder shape as accurate as possible using the pen and just get that keV right for my shoulders. Nice and easy. Honestly, it said super easy to just cut the clay like this. Obviously don't press down too hard. You don't want to hurt your table underneath, but I like the F pressure. We'll get through the clay. And then when I'm happy with the slope of the shoulders, I'm then going to cut out the area for my next the curved area where my neck goes in the T-shaped, just the same with the pen, just cosine now cussing out a semicircle. And then I'm going to use my fingers to just smooth down all the edges like we've been doing this whole way through now. Well, the bottom edge of my t-shirt to be a bit straighter than it is at the moment. So I'm just using a bit more clay to just straight and now I'm down at the bottom and then I'll just smooth that together with my fingers. So, you know, if your shapes not perfect, you can always add clay into the areas where you want to extend your piece of clothing. And then we will move this down and get this shape accurate. Now I'm pretty happy, but I think the neck WHO probably needs to be a little bit bigger. So I'm just going to cut away with my pin and try and get that net choline a bit more accurate to the picture, can see that the hole in the TCA is quite deep. It does go down a bit. And then you just use your fingers again to smooth down any edges that you've cut just so that things look nice and neat and tidy. The next bit of detail, but I'm going to add is the color of the shot. And to do this, I'm using my secondary color, the lighter color. And I have just flattened out a strip of clay. And to get the edge nice and neat, I'm using my scissors to cut a curved section that will become the edge of the neck of the shed. Um, so moving down the edges with my finger as well and cleaning the citizens as I go just to make sure. But you get a nice clean cut when you use them. The next time. I'm essentially going to cut this color line into a thin strip. And I'm just going to push that down onto my T-Shirt shapes. So I'm just using the citizen again to cut the inner edge and get that as straight as I can to honestly, this is the easiest way just using a pair of scissors and it's quite easy to clean your scissors as well. You can either wipe them with a baby wipe or just washed them like you would washing up, you'll put some pens. I'm just using my fingers to make sure that the edges and really smooth. And then I'm going to lay this on top of the T-Shirts and push it down. You can see that the strips a little bit too long. So again, I'm going to use a scissors. I'm going to go in there and I'm going to just cut the end off so that it just lines up with the edge of the TCGA on the shoulder. I'm just gonna take a little bit the height of the color as well with the pin. So I'm just going to slide the pin along the surface and just scrape off the top layer of clay just to flatten down that color allele as well. The next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to create that camouflage pattern on the shirt. And what I'm gonna do, I've decided to take the approach of flattening out my lighter blue color. So I'm just doing this with my fingers. I quite like the handmade rustic look. I like the fingerprints. I like things to look a little bit more handmade. If you don't, you could use a rolling pin. You could roll this out completely, perfectly flat. I'm just using my fingers. Your hands are a great tool, so you might as well use them. And then I'm just going to etch into this with my pen. Rough shapes. The different camouflage pattern paces. So I'm just going to create outlines based on the reference picture, roughly the shapes that you see on the shadow. I'm going to translate onto the clay. And then I'm gonna go in with the scissors and I'm going to cut these out the best I can. Now. They are going to be delicate and they're going to be a little bit rough around the edges. I'm going to use my fingers, just move them down and try and make them as neat as possible. And when we lay them on top of the TCGA, we can always take a little bit the height off by carefully scraping them with the pen as well. So as I cut each bet the pattern now I'm placing them down on the shelf trying to get a layout looks similar to my reference picture. And I'm just going to keep adding bits of camouflage until I'm happy that the T-shaped looks populated enough when it's all on there, I'm smoothing down all these pieces with the pin, taking a little bit of height of the layers and just getting things to look as neat as possible with my fingers and thumb against moving everything down. And I think day it looks like quite a nice clay version of the shot is no exactly the same. You might say that the show has three different colors. But for working with clay that could be a bit too complex. It's a bit unnecessary. We just want a suggestion of the passengers, so I am sticking with the two colors and I'm getting pretty happy with how this is looking. So I'm almost done. And the final thing I like to do with clothing is I like to add some crease detail with the pin. So you'll notice on the shirt there are some creases where the material is sort of hanging on my body. There's also an outline on the Cola. So I'm going to use the pin to just draw these in. You will be confident hare usual observational skills and just be confident with the line is quite difficult to correct this if he go wrong. So get it right on the first attempt. Just put the lines in. I'm going to outline this color first and then I'm going to try and put creases in the shuts around the sleeves and also on the chest where it's hanging on my body just to match up with the reference picture. I think these details just make clothing look a little bit more realistic. And when you have done all of these, you can use your finger to lightly smooth down the edges as well. You'll notice that it sort of made a jacket edge down at the bottom. So you can just smooth that down with a finger or thumb. And then we have a, I'm pretty happy with that. Shut. Some people watching this may think I've gone a bit over the top with the pattern here. You probably will look at that and think, wow, I can't really be bothered with the effort of creating the Patton and doing all that detail. So I'm going to show you another method, a simple method for doing a similar effect. So imagine instead of a camouflage T-Shirt, wearing a tight IT shop, something that was a whole module of blues, bit like this bot here. So this is a lot of different blue colors that I've mixed together, but I haven't completely mixed together. So you can still see the variation in the color. I'm going to flatten this out just like I did before with my darker color clay for the shut. And I'm going to lay this down flat and this solid piece is going to become the t-shaped. So we're gonna get some variation in color. I'm going to use the pin to call the net call and trace around where the shoulders would be. And this is going to become the shut. This can be quite effective to, so if you didn't want to be quite so literal with the pattern and you just wanted something that was a cool shot. You could just mix some clay. So they looked a bit more ball-like, bit tie dye like then literally just take a piece of the off cuts, make it into a flat strip. I bet one is the color, and then flatten it down in the same way as we did before by slicing off the top layer of the clay. And then we just want to go in with the PIN and dual of those creased details we just did on the overshot. And they, you have a much simpler, much faster way of creating a piece of clothing. So some of you might prefer this method. If you're not too fussed with the accuracy of the pattern, then you can go with something a little bit more abstract like this. So let's recap. Just like with the face, create a main shape first to build upon. Then at any patent or details, too much fat. Why not try the simpler mobile tie-dye look? Next, I will be quickly whizzing through how to clean up your photographed scoped in Photoshop using some very basic tools.
13. Digital Enhancements: Now once you've finished, just sculpt, you're going to want to photograph it. So you need to get assembled on your table and make sure the area as well linked. I'm using oneself books with five LED lights in. He didn't have to go that far. You could just make sure that you're taking a picture near an open window so there's lots of natural light showing through. You'll notice that I've put a little bowl of plasticine underneath the head to lift up a bit. This is so you get the shadow of the head, on the neck and on the TI shut, and it just makes things look a bit more natural. It also mean that when I photograph it, there'll be a sharper focus on the face and the slightly softer edges on the clothing. So it will look a little bit more like if you were to photograph yourself. So it doesn't matter what you take a picture with. You could use your phone or DSLR. I always advise to take a picture with the best camera that you have. And then what you're gonna do is open up Photoshop, bringing your photograph of your scoped, and open your reference picture as well. You can go up to Window and split the screen into like I have. So you can see both of them together. And there were lots of simple tools in Photoshop that you can use to correct any imperfections. The first one that I go to is the clone tool. What you do with this is you select an area that is perfect. So a piece of skin that has no imperfections, hold down Alt and click, and then, and then hold down somewhere else by ego and imperfection. And you can essentially paste that good area on top. Now it doesn't take a lot of skill to use this total. We have to be a bit careful to make sure that you're selecting the same tone of color as the area that you're going to cover up. If you are selecting a bit of shadow and putting the overall light area, then it's not going to blend in and look right. Another option, if you're not keen on the clone tool is to use the healing tool. The healing tool is just like a pasta, heels things. So you literally just draw with this over the imperfections and it will magically just figure out what's wrong and correct it using AI. You can see that I've corrected some imperfections on the glosses already and they are looking a lot neater. I'm now going to correct some bits on the skin tone as well. If you want less of a harsh change when you're using the Clone tool. So that was the first tool I discussed. You can also drop down at the top to 50 percent opacity. And this means that it's not going to solidly paste the selection that you've made it. We'll just do on half opacity. This can be good for softening down harsh edges and not like losing the edge completely. And that's it for basic corrections of the things you can do to improve the look of your Skulpt is to shift the brightness and contrast. And also play with the vibrance to just make the colors pop a little bit more. And depending how you photographed it and what service she photographed on, you may also decide to cut out your clay sculpt and paste onto a different color background, like maybe a plain color. To do this, the beginner way is to just simply get the eraser tool with a soft edge and to just erase the background. So carefully go around the edge of your scoped and then erase the rest of the background. And you can use this technique to even change the proportions of aspects of your skull. Ok, so for example, in my scope, you might say that the heads a little bit too big. It looks a little bit like one of those noting dogs, perhaps the TCGA and the shoulder area are a little bit small in proportion. So I could cut around the TCGA and select that separately to the head and then expand it and make it bigger. So if you feel that you've got a major era light, that you can correct the scale of a certain aspect of your scoped as well. You can really fine tune things digitally as much as you want. It depends what kind of look you're going for. You may be completely happy with your sculpt and just want to photograph it. Maybe boost the vibrance or the brightness, and then just leave it there. It's all down to individual preference, but with things like glosses and just areas that haven't been able to move down as perfectly as you might like digitally using the Healing Brush Tool or the clone stamp, you can really perfect your portrait and make it look much more. Wow, hopefully that made sense if you've got any questions, do star discussion. My screen recording software hasn't been working, so I had to record this in Zoom, which Jim wouldn't play back properly in my edit test. So my narration might not be spot-on, but I'm hopefully you've graphs y was saying. And like I said, you don't have to take this step at all. This is just for if you want to do that extra bit of clean up and correct anything that you weren't happy with at the sculpting stage. So let's recap the main tools for clean up the clone stamp and the Healing Brush tool. You can also use the eraser to cut around the edges of your sculpt. Don't forget sometimes brightness, contrast and vibrance can make the image pop a little more to our next awesome case studies of other faces. For now, they are characters from squid game. But when students start sending the images, you can expect those to follow too.
14. Case Study One: Okay. Thank you very much. Exercise. Okay. Okay.
15. Case Study Two: Music. If your boss, in recent years, hello.
16. Outroduction: Thank you very much for taking my class today. I hope you found this helpful. Don't forget to leave me a review and follow me here on Skillshare to get notified of any new classes that I make. As well as this, I also have a YouTube channel where I have been posting many sculpting process videos. I don't forget it was struggling with your own self portrait and you want to see how I approach things off. You've left a review, email me a picture of yourself, and if you're lucky, I'll choose you and I'll add in a new lesson showing how I approach sculpting you. I hope that sounds exciting and will be helpful. Thank you very much for watching and have a great day and I'll catch you again in the next class.
Tortor Smith, Director, Animator, Writer
