Sculpting Skye again: head

Because making from scratch a toy figure of my first and favorite JW Velociraptor OC once wasn't enough, I made another one, this time depicting her as an adult. This post is about sculpting the figure's head, I have two other posts about sculpting her wings and body. I didn't first complete one part and then move onto the next, and all were in progress simultaneously, but this felt like a logical way of dividing up recounting this rather lengthy birbmaking process (which took from November 2022 to May 2023).

Skye is part of a figure set with her wife and two kids. You can find all the posts relevant to making all four of them in this tag.

I seem to like to start my raptorsculptings with the mouth, and this time was no exception. It's a big part of a raptor's face, so a lot about the rest is just kind of built around it.

Like her previous figure, I sculpted her mostly with polymer clay, and it's the material I started with. To make her palate concave instead of flat this time, I first sculpted just the gums and teeth, and baked them, then attached them to a piece of foil where I'd shaped an indent lined with unbaked clay. I added a few more teeth afterwards.

The lower jaw's mouth piece went through a few partial remakes as I tried to follow my measurements and fit and refit it with the upper jaw piece. I've never made an articulated jaw before, so needing to fit the mouth pieces together this precisely is new territory. The lower teeth are measured to fit inside the row of upper teeth when the mouth is closed.

I thought a lot about how to make the jaw hinge, and after coming up with a bunch of complicated ways that would probably not have worked at this small a scale, I just shaped a mandible out of a piece of 0.3mm jewelry wire bent in two and twisted together, with loops at the hinge part. The loops are already measured to fit what I picked for the axle of the hinge, but it'll be a while before I can assemble that.

Then I added some clay, starting with the bottom of the jaw between the wires, also attaching a fringe of foil to it. Kind of hard to see here what I was doing, but I assure you it was also hard to see what I was doing while I was doing it.

After baking that, I trimmed the foil and bent the edges back down for a lip armature, then added more clay on it, and eventually attached the mouth piece. It doesn't line up with the gap in the jaw piece perfectly, but well enough. The gap is there to give the throat part of the neck somewhere to go when the mouth opens.

Added clay to the sides of the upper jaw piece, to make a ledge to build the lip on.

Building walls for the jaw piece. After this I ran out of the khaki clay I'd mixed, and when re-checking my colour references to mix more, I realized it's actually too dark, so I mixed a lighter version.

Quite the difference, lol. I made these in early December, and the lighting is not the best in my apartment that time of the year.

I sculpted lips for both mouth pieces, and "glued" thin shavings of the lighter khaki* on the chin area with liquid clay. The rest of the outside of the jaw piece will get that, too, but I didn't want to run out of places to hold it, and baked what I'd added so far, and the outside of the jaw piece will still get feathers anyway. They'll get painted eventually at least in some places, but I don't want to have to paint the surfaces where paint is likely to chip off due to moving parts.

(*is it khaki? light brown? beige? cream? barely darker and barely less yellow than raptor teeth? what even is this colour? Kos you're an artist you should know.)

Snout! The nostrils are made with the tip of a darning needle.

And the lower jaw has been coated with lighter flecks on the inside as well, with just the feather parts still remaining unfinished on that front. I also redid some teeth again, for the third time, I think. Just added pink clay on top of the old teeth and put new teeth on top of that, as I wanted the back of the mouth to rise more.

I also made as much of the mouth corner tissue (jaw muscles & co.) as I dared to make with polymer clay, worried about whether they'll fit in the mouth when it's closed, height-wise.

Adding some feather texture to the sides of the jaw piece, and also making the corners of the mouth.

I made little snakes of clay and put a little notch in each in the middle (for smile creases), then placed them on top of the lower jaw's corners with foil inbetween in an effort to have the mouth corners match closely. It didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped, but maybe it helped with the next step.

With some more clay, and a thin sheet of foil inside it for strength, I attached the mouthcorners to the head piece, then fitted, adjusted, and refitted it with the lower jaw until I got them somewhat where I wanted them.

Also, I've attached a wire to the upper jaw so it's easier to hold.

I continued the upper lip to fill the gap, again with a lot of fitting with the lower jaw.

What a beautiful smile.

Then, time for eyes!

Where'd I get these peepers? I made them back when I sculpted juvie Skye. They're slices of the same eye pattern cane as the ones I used for that figure. I put a drop of liquid clay on them for corneas and baked them, and I think they turned out quite nice. I couldn't figure out how to do that last step the last time, so juvie Skye has flat eyes (should I have baked the liquid clay directly on the eyes instead of separately? turns out yes), but let's try it this way this time. The liquid clay is not perfectly clear, but the irises and pupils show through okay, and the glow-in-the dark clay also still gets enough light through it to glow. Works for me.

Eyes in place, building the shape of the head around them.

At this point I baked it. (Well, the next morning. I attached the eyes on new year's eve, and was still working on this when I noticed fireworks outside. Then I decided it's for the best that I leave having a good look at it before committing to the shape by baking it, as well as the 1-hour bake, for when I'm more rested.)

I tried to touch the corneas as little as possible with fingers sticky with raw clay, but I still managed to get them cloudier, as seen above. I put a fresh coat of liquid clay on the corneas, and they cleared up. Applying it with my silicon brush, like I have been doing elsewhere on the figure, as the tool is very convenient for that, left the surface a bit streaky, but I managed to mostly smooth it again before baking, by using a fingertip coated with clingwrap.

Then I mixed dark grey clay, and made eyelids for her so she can look spooky like this in the rare instance of midwinter sunshine Finland was graced with that day.

The inner corners of the eyes have a little bit of light pink and the outer corners a bit of yellow-orange on them that I added before the eyelids. The yellow-orange should really be whiteish sclera, but I like drawing the raptors with only irises and pupils visible in their eyes.

My arrangement for baking the head after adding the eyes was an oven-safe ceramic mug, partially filled with foil with a hole in the middle to stick the wire into, so the head stays upright and no raw clay parts get squished by leaning on things. The baking paper is there mostly to hold the snout in place so it doesn't spin around and bump into the mug walls while I transport it from sculpting table to oven.

The mug was also a convenient place to keep the head in while working on other things.

I later gave the eyelids some more clay, including black "eyeliner" on each upper eyelid. It's mostly as a resemblance to the cartoony style I draw the raptors in, which has a thicker line above the eye in a similar way as one might draw human eyes, to help with the eyes' expressiveness and basically representing stylized eyelashes. The raptors don't actually have eyelashes of course, although I suppose Skye might, considering she is feathered, and some birds have specialized feathers around their eyes that look like eyelashes.

I don't want to have to bring paint too close to the eyes, so the clay around them is already in more or less the right colours.

Starting on brow arches. They have foil inside as support, like I tried to do with Cloudburst, but her face was too small for it to work and Skye's is not.

More feathers on the lower jaw, and another fitting after adjustments to upper lip. Starting to look like a face, but I can't attach them to each other just yet.

More feathers for the upper part of the face, too: snout fluff, and bulking up the brows more. There is a lot of liquid clay brushed in there to get the fluff that smooth.

Even more! Cheek feathers above the mouthcorners, more brow adjustments, and the beginnings of her crest. There's foil inside it as filler and support.

Giving the crest more volume and texture, which is a mix of drawing with the sewing pin (and with the loop of nylon line for softer impressions, see end of the post for more about the tools), and thin snakes of clay blended together with the silicon brush and lots of liquid clay. Some more face feathers, too.

Smaller crest feathers at the top. The biggest one has a foil filling. The slits cut into the back of the feather were an accident at first, as I was just trying to use the craft blade to lift the feather a bit and missed, but I think it looks nicely feathery, so I cut more of them.

More! There are two more foil-filled claysnakes blended into the sides, and a bunch of smaller all-clay ones.

Then some blue, too! The blue feathers are all going to get at least partially painted later, but I like how they look. The middle one has a bit of shallow texturing with the nylon loop.

I also worked on the face elsewhere again. There are two more long crestfeathers on the sides (which in the above photos already have blue on the undersides), and I raised the top of the snout a little (it had a bit of an actual-Velociraptor-like dip between the tip of the snout and the eyes). The brows getting more prominent had also caused the eye sockets to look pretty deep especially above the eyes, so I added clay there. And since that made the shadows under the brows less pronounced, I made the brows a bit thicker.

This is the upper head piece's final form before switching to non-bake mediums.

And let's not forget Skye's little tassel beard. Another feature I thought a lot about how to make, since it'll easily get in the way of the jaw articulation. In the end I decided to make this floof a mere façade - a sham, a lie, an illusion! - and constructed it out of flat pieces with the middle remaining hollow.

After baking those flat pieces separately, I added clay around the gap at the underside of the jaw piece, and stuck the flat pieces into that, along with some small snakes of raw clay between them to hold them in place. I baked the jaw piece upside down, and propped on a piece of foil at the hinge end so I don't rest its weight on the pink jaw muscle bits that are thin clay pieces with no foil inside, in case that could squish them during the bake.

Still a gap at the front here. I wanted to attach this much first so there aren't too many loose pieces at the same time, probably falling over with nothing supporting them. I was a little worried about them falling over during the bake as it is, but they did fine.

The jaw articulation mechanism is a plastic rod cut from the leftover sprue of the model kit I used to make Swiftdive and Treeclimber, and some sort of plant from the bootleg LEGO set I assembled into a winged Indominus rex.

Oh, and funny story, when looking at the sprue more carefully, I noticed the kit does actually include tongues for the raptors!

I guess I just assumed the two loose limbs were the only parts left to attach since the raptor models came to me so close to fully assembled, and didn't bother to check. Well, now I have spare tongues. :D

I cut off extra limbs from the green piece, and then attached the parts. Unexpectedly, though, the moving joint is between the jaw and the rod, and not between the rod and the green ring. I think a bit of trimming I did to the rod's one end after previous fittings made it fit more loosely. But I can work with that.

For a bit of extra security that the rod isn't going to slip out of the holes in the jaw on the inside, I put little rings of polymer clay around it on that side. I baked them separately and glued them to the jaw piece, which is why they're each cut in half. I didn't want to take the mechanism apart again.

Painted black the stuff that may be visible through the mouth.

Sculpted and glued on a tongue. I didn't use one of the two from the model kit, because I wanted the tongue to be a particular shape. It's higher towards the back of the mouth to give the neck piece more room. They would also both have been too wide for the little space there is between the lower teeth.

Then I made use of some more small bits of plastic trash. Tiny domes cut from the rim of a yogurt cup lid, pieces cut from three different pink/red candy wrappers, and a bit of dried acrylic paint that was around the nozzle of my pink paint tube.

The two light pink flaps that I painted a bit before gluing them on became extensions for the jaw muscle tissue at the corners of the mouth. They're flexible enough to fold down when the mouth is closed, while still allowing the tissue to cover the whole corner of the mouth even when the mouth is open as wide as it goes.

I blended the seams between clay and candywrapper afterwards with paint, and then cut thin slivers from the ring of dried paint to glue on the edges of the jaw muscles, where painting on top of glue had gotten too messy and uneven-looking.

The red piece of candy wrapper with a swirly pattern is at the back of the palate to give the flaps a smooth surface to fold against. Not really visible on the finished figure, but the right colour in case it is.

The fuchsia triangle(s, there are two but only one pictured) went under the tongue towards the throat, to patch the gap there, so the neck piece going under the tongue isn't visible inside the mouth.

The yogurt cup lid domes I used for covering the articulation mechanism on the outside. I sanded the convex side of them a bit before cutting them out, so they have a texture on that side that sculpting material will stick to better, but left the concave side smooth.

I glued them over the ends of the axle rod. The domes are glued to the jaw piece, with the axle free to move under them.

After the glue had dried on both domes, I covered them up with clay feathers. There are a couple of small clusters of polymer clay feathers I baked separately, but the white material is air-dry clay, specifically a brand called silk clay.

I hadn't really used air-dry clay before, but after a few tests with silk clay, I decided it's suitable for this, with a big point in its favor being that it's very lightweight. Unlike epoxy putty, it's also non-toxic, since it's meant to be safe for small children to use, and stays a little flexible after drying.

I let the clay and dabs of glue dry again, and then painted the silk clay parts.

And then, it was finally time to unite the two head parts! I used a semi-planned mess of glue, jewelry wire, and a bit of foil, and with a lot of nudging and adjusting, got them to the position I wanted. She has a face! A whole face!

I reinforced the connection with epoxy putty around the wires here and there after the glue had dried.

After that I worked on getting the body to a point where I don't have to bake it anymore, and built as much of the neck as I could with polymer clay, fitting the head onto the figure after each bake, before finally uniting these parts, too.

I did the initial attachment with epoxy putty acting as both sculpting medium and adhesive, and keeping the head from falling off before it had cured was a bit of an ordeal.

I had to kind of hold the head in place, avoid tipping the figure forward because I don't want to lean her chest on anything in case the chest feathers might break, and apply and smooth bits of putty at the same time, and ended up doing all the sculpting with my non-dominant hand because the other one was already holding the head. It got easier once there was enough putty to mostly keep the head in place and when I managed to secure it with the jewelry wire wrapped around the neck and crest in the photo. Just had to keep checking that the head is in a position where the mouth can still open and that it's not tipping to either side despite the wire. Then I left it alone and did Not touch it until it had been at least 24 hours so the putty had fully hardened.

Headless no more. :)

The cured putty keeps the head attached already, but to not trust only one method, I also used a bit of jewelry wire (the same bit I also used as support during the curing process) and sewing string, which I'd attached to the body already before putting the head in place because I wouldn't have access there afterwards. The string would have been another wire, but I hadn't left enough space for that around the body wire I wanted to attach it to. So long as it's tied to both the head and the body, it works.

Then more cheek feathers. I sculpted two of these little lace trim looking things. They look very light in the photo, but they're the same polymer clay I'd mixed for Skye's underbelly colour. Baked them.

And glued them to the head, using silk clay under them as filler and moldable sculpting medium, to nudge them into the location and position I wanted them. The clay comes in various colours, so I used black here in case it's visible through the mouth. I also used it to fill the back of the mouth, which was more hollow than it needed to be.

I wasn't sure how to handle the seam between the cheek feathers already sculpted onto the head piece and the new addition, but the new bit is so flat it fit pretty neatly over the existing feathers, with the slight overlapping looking like what feathers do anyway.

The mouth corners seem to now be pointing downwards more than I'd like, though. That I had expected, but I didn't want to glue on the last bit of cheek fluff until after the jaw piece was attached to the head, to make sure I place it so it doesn't get in the way of articulation.

I baked two more tiny feathers, and glued them to the jaw piece at the mouth corners.

(An oversimplification of the process that was like 50% dropping the tiny feather over and over before I'd gotten it to where it needed to go, because it's too tiny to hold with pretty much anything, and having to look for it all over the floor and be fast enough about that to not let the glue dry by the time I can get it in place. I survived.)

Then I sculpted the rest of the neck floof. The white clay is silk clay sculpted directly onto the figure, the blue feathers are separately baked polymer clay that I glued among the silk clay ones. The longest polymer clay feathers I added to the top, just under the crest, have a stick of rolled up foil inside them for support.

I also used epoxy putty where I felt that feathers made of that material worked better. Mainly on the sides, while the back of the neck where the feathers are at their longest and pointiest is softer, more flexible materials (remember how I broke juvie Skyefigure's crest feathers by dropping her? I do). On the left side I'd left a small gap at the throat because I couldn't build the neck high enough there before I was sure it wouldn't get in the way of the head attachment, so I also covered it now with glued-on polymer clay feathers.

With the way the feathers overlap, I wouldn't be able to paint the bases of the blue crest feathers very well later, so I painted them now, as well as the border between blue and black.

Back of the neck fully fluffed apart from a few small polymer clay feathers I glued into the small gaps still left between bigger feathers. I mixed a grey version of the silk clay to minimize unpainted spots showing, though here they're already painted, too. The longest grey feather is a polymer clay one, made with clay I mixed to already be the right shade of green-grey, to further minimize having to fit a brush between feathers without staining the blue.

I used more feathers made of that green-grey polymer clay on the sides of the neck, including the bigger feather closer to the face on each side. Attached with glue in some places and epoxy putty in others, and blended in with the latter.

And with the neck properly feathered and all the wires there covered up, the last part of the figure to sculpt were the feet. Wanted to get a sense of how balanced the figure will be before sculpting those, and it was hard to tell until all the material adding weight was in place. More on that in the post I made about sculpting the body.

The sculpting tools I used for Skye are mostly the same I used for Tempest and Cloudburst, but are also joined by:

• a small pair of scissors (useful for cutting clay and foil where either simply tearing or cutting against a table wouldn't work as well. I don't recommend using scissors that you still want to use for other things, I doubt this is good for them)
• this blue sculpting tool I got in a set originally intended for fondant, works for clay/putty just as well and was cheaper than tools meant for them
• toothpicks for miscellaneous poking and picking at things
  
• a piece of a plastic drinking straw, cut at an angle that makes a nice stamp for feather outlines
• a loop of 0.3mm nylon line and another loop of 0.3mm jewelry wire (both of them useful for drawing thin detail lines where the angle isn't practical for using the sewing pin)

And tools I used for sculpting with epoxy putty in particular (though not the only tools I used for it):

• a small cup of water to dip tools in to keep the putty from sticking to them when smoothing things. I had to be careful with using water in the neckfeathers, though, since air-dry clay reacts to water even after drying, so I didn't want to get that wet. Water is also not suitable for sculpting with polymer clay, though baked polymer clay is fine getting water on it.
  
• a makeup brush (I find brushing over seams with a soft, damp brush a good help at blending them with other tools)
• nitrile gloves (a.k.a. medical examination gloves, I'm currently going through a big box of them that I bought at the pharmacy. Unlike in the case of medical examinations, they can also be used multiple times for this)
  

More stuff about the other tools and general polymer clay sculpting in Tempest's post.