The Six Million Dollar Sculpt

After sculpting my own head and working out the trial and error of the process, I busted out the Sculpey once more in order to work on a famous head. I wanted mostly to see if the first sculpt was actual skill or lightning in a bottle.

I chose a fairly benign subject to test it out on, Lee Majors as Steve Austin the Six Million Dollar Man.

I began with a working drawing, which while it may not look exactly like him, functions as a blueprint. This allows me to breakdown all the planes of his face and the major surfaces and shapes, well before scupting them. I worked from photographs and DVD stills to generate this drawing.

I also utilized copious amounts of photographs from any which angle I could get, in order to fully realize his facial features.  

 The entire head is sculpted in Translucent Sculpey. i find it works much more smoothly and bakes much more easily than standard white. Although there are still some things I would prefer to use the white for.

 During the initial sculpting the head is made with a core of Aluminum foil rolled into a roughly head shaped ball. This not only uses less sculpey, but makes it more firm and reduces the baking time.

The eyeballs are formed by first plugging two 4 mm metal craft beads into the eye sockets then sculpting the lids around them. 4 mm is a standard reference size for human eyeballs in 1/6th scale which is the size in which this head was sculpted.

When it came time to sculpt the hair I was lucky enough to have been watching the show on TV so I got pretty good looks at his hair and the way it lays over his head as I was sculpting.

 Details like eyebrows, fine eye wrinkles, forehead creasing sideburns and hair strands were left till just before I shoved him into the oven. Once hardened and left to sit overnight I sanded down the entire surface and polished it as smooth as possible to prep it for painting.

PAINTING COMING UP IN THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR SCULPT PART 2!