Forensic Sculpture - Day 2

End of Day 2

Lots of work done today. Although looking at the final picture the sculpture looks like something out of a haunted house.

Today we added the tissue depth markers, filled in the skull, made the ears and made the pupils.

Detail of the tissue depth markers of the face. 

Tissue depth markers are the straws placed around various points of the skull.  They represent the average amount of flesh in a given area of the skull. Our instructions here were to go from specific to more general when filling in the tissue depth marks. The tissue depths of higher on the face are pretty universal, as you get lower on the face the averages become less reliable.

It is kind of obvious when you think about it most people from above the cheekbones are very similar and there is a universality to human faces. As you get lower in the face differences in gender, race and weight make a big difference.

So Joe's instruction is to go with the face you're creating when deciding to fill in the lower tissue depth markers. He even pointed out that following the tissue depth markers blindly lead you to create a large-jawed sculpture.

I had a little problems with this because of the skulls missing teeth. The Tissue markers in certain places were difficult to place.

There was some time so we filled in the scalp of the piece. It was a simple process of using the top of the head marker and extending it to the forehead marker and the zigomtic arch (cheekbone).

Today we also added the ears to the piece. There is not a lot of information about the ears recorded on the skull. We know there general size, direction they are angled and if the ear lobes are connected or not. While ear formations  are unique to each individual (almost like a fingerprint) used in the identification of missing children most of that information is loss. So we have to include the ears but they need to be rather generic.

It is amazing how different all the busts look around the room. The individuality of each of the skulls is starting to appear. It's amazing how quick that happened.