This was a simple exercise on sculpting the skeleton and then major muscles. But as you can imagine I put a fair bit of extra time into it after class. I had fun, so I figured I’d push myself. The exercise was to build the sculpture up as a skeleton, and then apply the muscles to it so we’d begin to understand where the muscles attach, how they work, why the skin covering bulges or twists the way it does. Then one side was to be left with no muscle. The arms and legs of the skeleton are left unfinished because they would be too thin for clay and it would dry out too quickly. It’s approx 30 inches tall.

I’m not particularly happy with it as it has proportion problems, I’m aware of that, but I was a bit constrained for time. David was particularly happy with the calf muscles and the work on the back of the skeleton. And He shook my hand. Which made me feel incredibly good as you can imagine.

I started putting the shims in it by accident before taking photos. That’s why there’s those funny little pieces of metal sticking out of it on the left. I figured it would just be better to leave them in then rip them out for the photos. They were for separating the 2 halves of the brush on urethane mould (I put shims around the whole thing eventually, moulded it and cast it in wax).