Woah! Hey! I have a website!
All my dear reader (singular) will be delighted to know I haven’t abandoned the idea of marking my artistic progress blog-style over on my little corner of the internet. No, I intend to keep doing so when I have progress to speak of.
Since March there just simply hasn’t been much of it! Not for lack of trying, but life has a habit of getting in my way. Over the last few months I purchased (and moved) my home and quickly fell slave to an overly-ambitious DIY attitude. Why pay someone to do something when I can spend double that on tools and months of time trying for a worse result? It’s MY house, after all, I should be the one working on it!
I sit now in the heat of the summer, lights off, fan on. I am surrounded by half-finished projects, and not one involving digital voxels.
That’s not all that’s kept me I’m afraid. I have been sculpting for the last several months to mixed success: see my first male full-figure anatomy study of which I am quite proud.
I learned a lot doing this piece, but it was the type of learning that felt intrinsic. The natural dance of struggle and strive led to a result I could set down on a proverbial shelf and admire for what it is. I can’t say the same, however, for the major coup de grâce of my sculpting career the last few months…
WOMEN.
It is often said that appealing female figures are the most difficult thing an artist can create. I believe this to be true for a variety of reasons. There’s no doubt that loftier ideals are placed (fairly or unfairly) on feminine beauty, but I believe this phenomenon goes beyond societal standards. The female form in it’s artistic ideal is the mettle artists and art-enjoyers have tested themselves against since at least the renaissance. (Or since the dawn of art itself, if you’re so inclined..) That beauty is by it’s nature a subtler and more elegant one. One that requires immense attention to detail and ability in the artist’s craft. There’s simply much less room for error.
At risk of sounding too much like either an incel or an art historian, I’d like to note here my personal journey with trying to wrangle “feminine” beauty since I first failed to do so in January of this year, from the very beginning, to the first female sculpt I can say is sufficient.
The First Try
In early February of this year I was cruising along my new oath to get better at character art and hit my first major hurdle - the female bust. I had just successfully completed the male bust and was certain that if I could only push a little harder, I could defeat the female bust as well. Instead, it defeated me - and here my obsession was born.
I would do this study no less than seven times over the next four months. I would spend hours on a sculpt, revert, try again, start over, to no success.
See below my feverish notes over attempt number one, dated February eighth.
And below, attempts number three (left) and five (right) from February 13th and April 1st.
No matter my course of action, I felt no progress. I felt my attempts falter in the same places, and hopelessly tried again thinking it may change.
The “Last Try”
All this time I was learning and growing in other areas, intersplicing my studies with other more successful projects. The failure within me only lingered and mounted. To harness ideal beauty was not just to make attractive girls (though, hey, who doesn’t like those!) - it was to be successful at all. If I wasn’t able to parse out my faults here, this entire line of study would be a waste of my time.
You’ll see above no notes, journals, or thoughts on what I was doing - a hard lesson I learned and wrote about in my first post.
So with renewed vigor I told myself I would try one more time - this time being intensely rigid in my time structure and note taking. On the 23rd of March I began a new post for this very blog. One where I would detail every step and thought along the way as I attempted the female bust once again. I said then:
What you are about to read are my thoughts as I resolutely adhere to these points. If my hypothesis is correct, this story will have a happy ending. If it isn’t, well, I guess we’ll see!
You see, instead of my usual project postmortem, I will be using this post as an ongoing journal to document my progress. I will be following a few simple rules. My time will be divided into fourteen 30-minute chunks for a total of seven hours.
As you can see, this post obviously never made it onto this blog. My hypothesis failed, leaving it a story with no ending. I’ll pick out some interesting bits below, but if you want for some reason you can read the entire thing here - which is made very funny in hindsight knowing poor past-Carter is doomed.
This is where my “last try” died. I’ll discuss my findings as to why in a moment, but unfortunately for me I am obsessively stubborn. Only weeks after, I found myself yearning to try yet again. It simply felt like a neccsary step to my success as an artist. And so…
The “Last Last Try”
Finally, as June rolled into July I felt I had sufficiently done it - my first female bust. (Oh, so that’s why they call it a bust! clown noises)
I relinquished the reference from my previous seven attempts and just let myself aim for something else. This time not thinking of it as a “try” at all, just some work I wanted to do. No specific likeness - just aiming for femininity.
Ultimately, I think I finally got there. The interplay of sharp and soft features are what it’s all about. Soft, rolling curves like the cheekbones or cranium should taper into sharp, tight skin over bony landmarks.
In my opinion, this is the single defining challenge of the female bust - the bony landmarks are ludicrously important. The skull and cranium have so many little subtleties that tilt the gender scales™ in either direction.
Primarily, this bit where the orbitals meet the zygomatic and form the cheekbone was a defining feature for me. I kept wanting to dial it back, but there is a sizeable indent in the flesh regardless of cheekbone size - it needs to stick out to help define the angles of the mandible.
I was also quite weary of how the eye lids sit into the orbits, but have come to find that the both lids (especially the bottom) are thick - and the large fat pads above the eyes (called “pouches”) give feminine eyes their hooded appearance.
Lastly, the sillouete of the skull is more important - the cranium almost feels pointed, and should roll softly into the neck. The face should protrude outward. My faces kept falling way too flat and far into the skull. There needs to be enough space for a full mandible. I fun trick I picked up from SpeedChar on this one was masking the entire face and simply scaling it to get the ratio of face-to-skull feeling right.
And thats that! Is she perfect? Not at all! But I’m happy to have finally gotten close in what feels like the culmination of everything I’ve learned over the past five months.
Hope you found this interesting - until next time!
-Carter