Human Sculpture

[FootLoose]

An interesting Grotesque, Manfred. Are you considering doing something with the chin and/or jaw line? It looks a bit unbalanced at the moment, especially with the plain neck below.

[Dave Humphries]

A fascinating thread Manfred, thanks.

Looking at the image in post #18, the areas I'd be looking at are: the way the eyebrows rather abruptly end all in one almost vertical line and there's something about the tops of the ears that is too well defined across the depth there.

I note this has some asymmetry, introduced earlier, the eye/eyebrow feel just a little too close to each other? (on our left/her right)

Just my casual observations.

Cheers,
Dave

[Manfred M]

Thanks Greg and Dave - the image continues to evolve.

No the image is not perfectly symmetrical and that is definitely on purpose. The top of the head is a single asymmetrical piece and the alignment of the left and right hand side of the face are definitely not perfectly aligned.

The things I have been working on are to do a better transition of the top of the head out of focus and burned areas to more closely reflect what is happening with the neck. I ended up doing a couple of views, with the top layer blurred and feathered to provide a better transition from sharp to soft. I overlaid that with some hand burning with a very soft brush to simulate the lighting on the lower portions of the image.

I have burned down the tops of the ears and have played around with an additional architectural element lower down on the face (it's not working right yet as the architectural element I used has too hard a shadow). I also tried the same element above the nose and it works well there too, but again the shadow issue.

I like the way the eyebrows are looking as when working with professional models / makeup artists, the eyebrows are often plucked and shaved so that they no longer bear any resemblance to the model's normal eyebrows.

I know I need to be a bit more dodging and burning near the top of the head as well. I've also played around with changing the background colour, but that is not working well either.

I have a few more weeks to think about this. I expect I will be entering this in a club competition in November and if it does well there, I might add it to the package I am looking at entering in a national competition as well.

This is getting close to being 90% complete and the changes still seem to be improving the image. Once I get to the point where there is little or no improvement, I tend to stop. I have a snapshot of each phase of the work, so I do go back and forth to see what seems to be working. I still look at the image once or twice a day but will probably not look at it for a couple of days now and see what I think when I look at it again. That tends to be how I work on all of my image, especially the challenging ones.