The Gray Bird Sings: Concentration II : The Strongman

During the process of creating this piece, I was finally able to narrow down my concentration: Freak Show Performers. I notice in hindsight that this might have been inspired by many of my friends fan-girling over American Horror Story but I hope to interpret these characters very differently and come up with my own version of classic acts first made popular in 16th century England.

For this concentration, I decided to create a male character based off the "strong man" act that was known for his signature facial hair and for lifting heavy objects or humans in front of a live audience.

I really wanted my strong man to be holding a toothpick in his mouth so the first obvious thing to do was use one of my classmates, Peter, as a model.

I then create my two pinch pots, attached them, added dents for the eye sockets and added a mustache, nose, chin, and lower lip.

I also took a giant lump of clay and shaped it into a preliminary shoulder and chest form.

I added eyes and eyelids and refined some of the structural details of my character's face.

I soon noticed how unnatural he looked with his mouth closed like that so I had to rip off that pretty little mustache and sculpt a more toothy mouth.

First order of business: find the perfect model:

MYSELF!

Do you see a resemblance? Because I sure do! And yes, I am a part-time model, thank you for asking.

After not capturing the absolute perfect expression for my Strong Man because I cannot model for my life, I set on a quest to sculpt the expression I wanted with a more test and check approach.

Exhibit A:

Uh.... no.

Exhibit B:

Closer but still no.

I decided to move on to another part of the sculpting process and come back to Strong Man's face later because I was going no where at that point.

So I skipped over to my favorite part: REMOVING THE INNARDS!

Teeheeee you can see his nose holes

Being the genius that I am, I thinned out too much around his eye ONCE AGAIN (yes, I have done this once before) and I don't know if you can see by the picture above, but I had to patch up his eye and re-sculpt it.

I then reattached his scalp and moved on to plopping his head onto a neck and then onto a chest.

I proceeded to adding some muscles and had to unfortunately use reference photos of really ugly men (it is really hard to write sarcastically but what I in fact am being sarcastic; these reference photos made my day, Tom Hardy is beautiful and has mad trapz that should be worshipped)

My teacher also gave me a heads up (pun intended) when she noticed that my sculpture's face was pointed up in an unnatural angle.

He looks quite scrawny in the above photo but I eventually added almost another head length of clay to his shoulders and refined his muscles.

I also added ears to top off his main anatomy.

As you can see, I broadened his shoulders and added his one-strap costume.

And with this large amount of added clay, comes the need to...

REMOVE THE INNARDS!! MWAHAHAHAHAHAH

The result was a very large amount of scrap clay and a satisfaction that is very concerning to have had after carving out the insides of a fake person. I should probably talk to someone about that.....

ANYWAY

I used water and some paintbrushes to smooth out the surfaces of his skin and finalize any rough edges.

I also used some texture tools to add the fur effect to his singlet!