Polymer Clay Fan

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Sculpting the ears

Posted by goregt On July - 13 - 2007

Sculpting the Fiddler’s ears

I’ve been using these rough placeholders as ears for awhile now and it has gotten to the point where they are starting to bug me.  Ears take some patience to sculpt also so I have been putting them off for awhile.

Since I am sculpting the devil in this piece I decided to give him pointed ears shaped like an elf’s.  Just another tweak to add to the overall look of the piece.

* This sculpture is created with Super Sculpey.


sculpting an ear in polymer clay Step one is to design the rough shape of the ears.
   
sculpting an ear in polymer clay Now that I have my rough outline, the next step is the start defining the outer ear.  Little snakes of clay do the trick here.
   
sculpting an ear in polymer clay Now the same goes for the inner tubes and grooves in the ear.  I use additional snakes of clay to create the canals in the ear.  Just build out the individual shapes slowly and everything will come together.
   
sculpting an ear in polymer clay Now that I have my ear the way that I want it I take a brush and rubbing alcohol to smooth everything out.
   
sculpting an ear in polymer clay And a look of my ear with a little distance
   
sculpting an ear in polymer clay …. and another angle shot of my ear.

Next lesson – Fixing the forearm

Previous lesson Spicing up the neck

Back to the series home

4 Responses to “Sculpting the ears”

  1. Bev says:

    I don’t have an actual website, haven’t yet figured out how to do that, so here are my flickr pages. Just wanted to thank you for this tutorial. Ears are one of the banes of my existence. But I have always tried to sculpt from the one piece of clay, didn’t think of adding snakes, etc. I’m checking out your hands tutes later, as for sure they have always been a problem for me as well. I usually try to do the difficult things first, so the dreaded hands have usually been done before too much else on my sculpts, and not necessarily successfully.

  2. goregt says:

    Hi Bev,

    I checked out your flickr page, you have some great looking dolls on there.

    I personally try to save things like the hands and feet towards the end (or at least after a rough face has been created). The reason being is that if I want to make sure that my hands are not too big or too small compared to the face. I usually put together a rough sculpt of the face and build out the rest of the body proportions from there. There are some sculptors that save the face towards the end but for me it always seemed to cause issues.

    All the best,
    Gerald

  3. Darin says:

    Hey, how do you make wrinkles?they look sodetailed and natural

  4. goregt says:

    Wrinkles are achieved by carving lines into the clay. For the larger wrinkles loop tools are used to round them out but the real trick is smoothing them with rubbing alcohol.

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