WHAT TO DO WITH THE LEFT OVERS?

Whilst starting work on some old skull projects today (adding the faces), it occurred to me that I don’t recall the last time I stood by my blogs name sake & actually ‘sculpted’ something start to finish, I mean completely. Paper mache after all does refer to ‘pulp’ does it not?

Do you remember a while back I started mass foil copying of blank skulls up to fourty of which I said I wanted for a single project alone? No, here is a reminder picture of the first wave of those very first skulls:

Click on image to enlarge

Since I have a good pile of pulp from my recent (pre-Christmas) plaster pulp experiments at hand (both first stage ‘nuggets’ as I call them & second stage the ‘fluff’ stage) I figured why not actually sculpt something with it? Well amongst the projects those mass copied skull blanks were destined for three of them are destined for new wall mounted reapers. Grabbing three at random I then chose again at random one of the three to work on with pulp & sculpt a skull face. I will of course only be sculpting the one skull then copying that finished ‘face’ for not only the other two reapers faces but all the other ‘blank skulls’ too. Whilst throughout this blog I have shown you how to copy simple forms using three main methods they being: foil, plaster & latex moulding fluid. Which of these methods I will finally use for the three reapers project I am not certain as yet. Each will work perfectly for what I want of them & of course the foil is the fasted of the three. At this point in time that is not relevant yet so I will leave that for now. I apologise for the poor quality of the pictures it's winter & combined with these stupid low wattage light bulbs we can only buy in the UK now, well as you can see below.

THE FIRST OF THE THREE REAPERS SKULL STAGE 1: THE BLANK SKULL

Click on image to enlarge

As you can see the blank skulls are literally that, blank, devoid of any real (or grunge like) features to speak of. This seems like a backward time wasting way to do this the mass copying I mean but for the large fourty skull project I have planned only around ten at most will have the full face or even full or partial profiles of the faces showing to any real degree. I can’t explain this fully in any real kind of details without giving the project away ahead of the completed build. Once I finish that project you will understand clearly ‘why’ these blank skulls were copied as they were much more clearly, well instantly.

THE FIRST OF THE THREE REAPER SKULLS STAGE 2: SCULPTING THE SKULL

Click on image to enlarge

If you have never sculpted using pulp you will quickly discover that if you have sculpted with any clay then pulp IS a totally different medium entirely. Whilst you can use it ‘like’ clay it will not & does not follow the same rules as clay. The main rule being with clay you CAN add & add & add clay & sculpt all day long if you wish. Pulp however no matter how well you mix it or even if you mixed paper clay (Pulp & clay combined) you HAVE to go slowly & in stages then between stages allowing each stage to fully dry out before adding more pulp to your sculpt. Unlike natural clay no matter what type of glue or how well you mix it in large pulp sculpture WILL get very wet & during the construction very heavy. Once you reach a certain point the weight of the pulp will literally sag & in a lot of cases pull itself apart under its own weight.

Not counting a single ten minute break to let my reaper skull air dry out a little as I worked what you see above so far only took me around thirty minutes. Of course owing to the size of this sculpt & the speed at which I personally could have sculpted the whole thing (not adding the final finer details at this point) it would have taken me an hour to finish completely. In the end I held to the rules as dictated by the nature of the pulp. This being a pure pulp (nothing but paper & PVA glue) I thought it best to let the pulp dictate the rules above everything.

As I said I have not & am not going to add the final ‘finer details’ to this skull yet for two reasons:

1: The pulp being too wet & not quite refined to give me the final smooth finish I’d require it will make sculpting the finer details tricky at best since I have to smooth the final skull out using my dragon skin later & because of the way I work a little pointless at this stage.

2: Not yet having chosen a copying method for the face of this skull to use on the other ‘blank’ skulls due to the fact the majority of them wont require such finesse anyway.

So that’s the new reapers skull for now. I have placed it above a radiator to dry over night. With luck no one will knock it & it will be nicely dried ready to add the rest of the back of the head & start on remaining facial features (cheek regions temples etc) prior to adding the dragon skin to smooth out the skull for final copying etc.

More soon.