In this tutorial I will go into more detail on how I created the textures on the skirt. Keep in mind that I got the idea for the design of the skirt from looking at various pictures of African women on the web. Most of my research was from images that the search results produced from the keyword “African scarification”. During my research I found several images where the skirt just seemed to overlap itself in various places around the woman’s legs. The design appealed to me, in some respects it was very simplistic but the design in the images still seemed to draw me to the beauty of the woman in the photograph. I really liked this design and wanted to incorporate it into this piece.
The skirt’s shape is really simple, just roll out sheets of clay in the pasta machine and wrap then along the legs of the sculpture in various stages. Once that is achieved I used my wire brush to scrape lines into the dress. I applied various pressure using the wire sculpting tool so that some of the lines were deeper while others were kind of shallow.
Once I have a series of lines flowing through the piece I took a stiff brush that I had soaked in alcohol and repeatedly pressed (tapped) it against the skirt to create a matted looking finish to the dress.
I have included a few photos below to document the process.
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