The design (still!)

I've been grappling with the design of this one for a little while now, trying to get over the hump of how she will look in the end. I'm still a bit stuck with the final look of the sculpture but 'Brutal Sun' (Sara) http://brutalsunstudio.deviantart.com/ suggested that the first sketch is the most dramatic, reminding her of this picture which we have all seen before but is still so moving!:

So, I think to myself 'Dare I make Judith's face like this?' I would really like to but this child is too young to be Judith and I need a few more reference pictures to sculpt a 'portrait' face. I wracked my brain for something similar and came up with Jennifer Connelly! 

 

(image http://www.tobeyoung.org/showthread.php?t=25125)

Okay, so, she's not quite as intensely emotional looking as the Afghan child picture but she is the right looking age and has some similar features, I think.

Yesterday I began making eyes. I used some glass milky beads and painted them with the new Genesis I bought. I have never used Genesis and it behaves quite differently to what I expected. Well, I managed to paint some irises I was semi-happy with, baked them up but when I laid them over my proportions chart (I do eyes on a glass plate so I can just sit it over the picture to check how they might look), they were way too large. (Thankyou Mark Dennis for the proportion chart I'm using curently http://madsculptor.blogspot.com/2011/02/proportions-simple-guide.html ).

Today I'm having another go at them. I'm using a tutorial that Eneida Rosa created a while ago (I think that she is in the process of uploading it to her current website: http://www.fairiesndreams.com ). It involves rolling a thin sausage of clay, slicing off small bits to roll into eyeballs, slicing those in half, pressing the iris on and painting them, finally coating with Fimo gel. I used translucent Fimo to get that cloudy, translucent, eyeball look and am working on a technique to get some little tiny veins in the clay, just a few, it is all about the details! I'll let you know how it goes. Still not sure if I will use Genesis on these eyes as I am finding the learning curve for painting with it, quite difficult. Luckily I have about 100 little eyeballs sitting in the oven, ready to be experimented on!