Mini Clay Bust Sculpture How to Sculpt a Human Head in Clay

This detailed clay tutorial will show you how to make a mini clay bust using the subtractive technique where you build the head and shoulders separately, carve them out, and attach. I'll also show you how to make each facial feature. If you love learning about art, support this public school teacher's side hustle and subscribe. With a fresh piece of clay, wedge your clay together because you're going to form the shape of your shoulders. I'm using my hands here and tapping it on the table and smoothing it out and for my clay bust, this is going to be the main support system. So this is the chest and the shoulders where the neck and head will sit. Now I'm making a mini bust and the scale of my work of art is tiny. If you would like to work larger, you're going to use the same technique but form the shoulders to the scale that you would like. I've had students do life-size before. Smoothing it out and using my hands and tapping it on the table to create the form that I would like with my shoulders. A wooden paddle is also a great tool to use but you can use your hand and the tabletop to kind of force your clay into the form that you want it to be. I'm going to build this bust in two parts. So next I'm going to create the head. I'm also going to have the neck that attaches to it as well. So I'm taking fresh clay and I'm wedging it together and this time I'm going for a more spherical head-like shape. You can see I'm patting the clay in a similar way and I'm rolling it on the table on top of canvas to create that rounded head-like shape. Then I'm pulling the clay and it looks kind of like a light bulb and this is going to be the neck that I'm going to connect the shoulders to. So I'm just kind of playing around right now. It's super rough. It's not formed at all and I'm going to spend so much time carving and sculpting and getting the facial features right but I want the skull shape to be right too. Now you can be creative. You could make an animal. You could make an abstract figure. Your bust could have two heads but I'm going for just a straight up neck and a typical human skull. I'm checking my size relationships to make sure it's about the right size that I want it to be knowing that there's so much refinement to do. Now I'm pulling the clay and I'm trying to form a chin. So this will be the front of my face and this is where I'll do the facial features and then I'm going to create a more rounded effect on the back of the skull to mimic the human head. I'm continuing to form and I did speed things up here to double time. I'm trying to make it not look like an alien and you want to look at references and look at what a human head actually looks like. Look at it from all angles. Look at it and turn it around as you work. Now an important thing that we're going to talk about next is when do you attach the two pieces together? This is a subtractive technique where we will be carving out the inside of the clay to make sure it's not too heavy and that it wouldn't explode in the kiln. Because my pieces are so small I'm going to carve them out first, put them in front of a fan, let them harden and then attach them. If you are working on a larger scale and you carve it when the clay is brand new and completely wet, you run the risk of the clay not being strong enough to support itself. Because I'm working in such a small scale I can carve it out as you're going to see me do now and I'm going to carve and measure with my shish kebab stick and a loop tool. Because my pieces are so small I'm going to carve out this small section here leaving a good half an inch or inch on each side then put it in front of the fan. What I'm going to do with my students is have them create both pieces so the shoulders and the head, wrap them up separately in bags and then carve it out on the second or third day that we work on it. Dry time is so important and it really depends on how large your pieces are, your environment and how fast your clay is drying. This ribbon tool is doing a great job kind of scooping everything and all this extra clay I'm going to recycle and use for facial features. This clay on the inside feels super easy to work with so it's not trash, it's not something to throw away, it's something to keep, to wedge and to use in the same session if possible. If not, recycle it so you can use it the next time. Once you're done you're going to use your hands and smooth your form very similar to making a pinch pot. If you've never made a pinch pot before you have to try it, it's a super great basic technique. Now if you're working larger I recommend keeping the walls or the outer edges of your clay much thicker than mine. I would do two inches if you're doing it life-size, maybe even more. Then you're going to do the same thing with the neck and head. Now because mine is so small I'm going to cut my head in half, scoop it out from two sides and then attach it back together because it's just so small. If you're doing this larger it might be super easy for you to go in there and scoop and then I'm going to carve out with the same ribbon tool up into the neck and then into the head. There is a misconception that clay will explode in the kiln if it's too thick. That is simply not true. Clay that is thick takes a long time to dry and sometimes you can have hidden pockets of moisture that does make your clay explode in the kiln. But the thickness isn't what's important, it's the dry time. So don't be scared to make your walls a little bit thicker. So you can see this is a much rounder piece of clay than my shoulders were and I don't need to scoop out all that much again because it is such a small piece. So as long as you give your clay enough time to dry and you have pathways for air to get through, which I'll show you how to do in the end, don't worry about making your walls too thick. I would definitely do an inch two inches depending on the size. You don't want to score slip and blend these pieces back together and they be so thin that they can't support themselves. Why does this make me think of deviled eggs? I don't know. I'm going to go ahead and scoop out both sides. I do think the subtractive technique really is easier for making a clay bust. I have done it before where students use coils and slabs to build instead of to carve and I do think this is a simpler technique. It is a little scary and you do have to be smart with your dry time, but that's just like any other time you're working with clay. So this piece with my neck, I'm going to stick my hands in there and just like I did with the other the neck and shoulders, I'm going to make sure that it's smooth, that it's not too thin, it's not too thick, and that everything is the right form that I want it to be. Pretty good. And then I'm going to scoop on the other side and this will be the top of the head. How satisfying is that? Don't be discouraged if your clay is a little misshapen at this point and don't be a perfectionist. Once you score slip and blend it back together, all of the detail work is going to come into play. So this is just kind of building your foundation and then you'll have so much time to make it work. This so reminds me of a pinch pot right here. I'm taking my hand and smoothing it out, making sure the two pieces are going to connect, and I'm going to just make sure that the walls aren't too thick or too thin. Looks like it fits. So now I'm going to let my clay dry because I don't want to blend it together and have it not support itself and collapse in on itself. So I'm going to take this. I'm going to let it dry and put it in front of a fan. All right, this has been sitting under a fan for about an hour. I did rotate it and I can see that it's pretty good. I'm going to be honest, I am rushing it a little bit. It's still a little bit moist. I could definitely have left it in the fan a little bit longer, but I'm in a rush. I want to get this done because my students will be doing this project very soon and it's been a long time since I have done this technique. Okay, so what I'm doing now is putting an air hole inside where the neck is going to connect to the shoulders. That way air can pass through the clay when it's in the kiln and it'll reduce the likelihood of it exploding. You want passageways for the air to flow through any big section that's closed off. So I'm going to put a hole here which is where the neck is going to connect to the shoulders. I'm using a needle tool for that and I'm just going to take that extra clay and add it to my collection of clay that I'll be using for slip. Speaking of slip, when you attach two pieces of clay you must score, slip, and blend. What you see me doing here is adding score marks. This opens up the clay surface so the two pieces you're attaching can fuse together. You will be putting score marks on both surfaces of whatever pieces of clay you are attaching no matter how big or small. I'm going to reinforce these score marks because this is such an important connection. I don't want to lose my head with this sculpture and so this is just a super important area and I want to make sure that I get it right. Slip is a combination of clay and water and I'm using a paintbrush that I have retired from painting and I'm swirling it around in my slip. Warm water works best and completely dried out clay works best when making your own slip. Then I'm going to put slip into the score marks and the slip acts as the glue. So the score marks opens up the clay and the slip is going to get in between each one so that when you press it together it is fused together and less likely to come unattached. Such an important step. You're going to be seeing me do this a lot. Now I'm going to Frankenstein my work of art and I'm going to take my shish kebab bamboo skewer and I'm going to reinforce with more score marks where it meets. I don't always do this but for this work of art I'm doing it because I don't want the neck to detach or to have any issues. My biggest issue is rushing the time with this. I did beautiful scoring and blending. Didn't wait as long as I should have to attach the two pieces but what are you going to do? I'm on a deadline. I'm taking my tool here and I'll put a link to all the tools I love in my description box and I'm blending this and that's the final step of attaching two pieces. Score marks to open up the clay, slip to glue it together and blend like it never happened. The goal is to never be able to tell that these were two separate pieces. Don't forget the top of the head too. I'll be attaching that as well. Now I'm going to speed things up again because I'm going to obsessively smooth my pieces of clay making sure that my chin stays intact. My sculpture has a clear sense of front and back. Now I'm going to attach the top part of the head and this piece has actually dried out pretty well because it is the smallest piece so I need to figure out where the front and where the back is and once I've done that I'm going to repeat those exact same steps of score, slipping and blending. It looks mostly right from all angles. It's not perfect but it will do and I'm going to use the same tool to create my score marks and this is the top of the head so I want to make sure that it's right as well. Don't forget to put score marks on both sides that way the clay can truly fuse together. I did speed things up here a little bit since you've seen me do it twice. Okay now that it fits time to add the slip and remember slip is just clay and water. I'm using the same brush and you only have to apply slip to one side. Sometimes you have to stir that slip up to make sure it's right. So I'm tapping my brush onto one side you can see the slip is getting into all the nooks and crannies. I'm going to do the same thing I did before and reinforce my score marks. I like that tool I use the wooden one but sometimes I feel like the score marks aren't quite as deep as I want them to be. I'm a little obsessive with that and so I'm going to make sure that there's just aggressive score marks, how Frankenstein does this look and then it's time to blend. Remember unless you're going for a scientific experiment type look which you'll see me go crazy with that later. You want to blend it so it looks like it was never more than one piece. Now it's time to smooth and form now that your pieces are all back together again. I'm using this wooden rib tool to pull my clay and smooth it and you'll also see me use it by tapping it on the side kind of like a paddle. Seriously a wooden paddle is a really great tool to use when you have hollow forms of clay like this. Since my piece is so small and I don't have a wooden palette for some crazy reason, I'll be mostly using my hands and then the rib tool. So you're going to see me do a lot of smoothing and forming and shifting everything to make sure it's exactly the way I want it to be. Be picky, look at it from all angles and know that there's really nothing you can't fix with clay whether it's carving or adding more. I'm going to look at it from the side and see if I can get a nice jaw line because the shape of my head really is incorrect. It has this like martian lizard like effect to it which I'm not going to stress about because I know that I'm going to be giving my bust lots of plastic surgery, making lots of additions as I go and right here is a mistake that I'm making. My clay is already thin and look how much I'm carving into it. So when in doubt leave your clay walls a little bit thicker and I know some art teachers are going to freak out about that and you know the thickness of clay is a big deal but remember as long as you let it dry completely, bone dry before you put it in the kiln and you give close off areas pathways so air can go through, your clay should not explode in the kiln. It almost always explodes due to moisture not due to thickness. Now thickness has a part it plays because the thicker it is the longer it dries but when you're constructing something heavy or you're constructing something like this make your clay walls a little bit thicker so that they can support themselves. I'm getting a nice shape to the back of my head but I'm giving you this warning now because I I know what's about to happen and my neck is not going to support itself the way it should because of how much I carved away. Another solution would be more picky before I scored slip and blended my pieces together but again this is me rushing this is what happens. Now I'm going to focus more on the jaw and I'm taking the ribbon tool to carefully cut away so next time I do this and when my students do it again I'm going to make things thicker and I'm using a little bit of slip on my finger just to blend. Don't overdo that because it does weaken your clay but I do like to put a layer of slip just to kind of smooth things out. This ribbon tool is really great for shaving away areas I seriously feel like a plastic surgeon right now but remember once you carve it away it's gone and the thinner your clay is the weaker it will be so use this tool with caution. Now I'm going to show you later how to make a patch if you carve in or you need to like re-support certain areas you can make a coil or a little tiny piece of clay and think of it like a splint or a bandage to keep your clay together. Now this creepy head you see on the left hand side that is my mannequin head that I'm using. I'm pretty good at sculpting something face on like looking directly straight ahead. The side and three-quarter view can be a little bit tricky so I'm using this mannequin just to kind of give me a good baseline and so I'm seeing how my face is a little too round so I'm flattening it out so it's going to stick out when I add like the nose and all those other facial features that stick out. So I'm just being as picky as I can working from all angles and I think I'm almost ready to get the face. I'm going to prop my sculpture up on a sponge which is a great technique if you're looking at something that you don't want to lay flat and I'm going to carve following basic facial proportions. You can see my mannequins over there too. So I'm dividing my face in half horizontally and vertically and then I'm adding two lines in the lower half and that's where the nose will end and the mouth will be as well. I'm going to be adding coils to create some bone structure so I'm going to create an area where the brow is sticking out. Right now my face is kind of flat so I'm going to add that bone structure using coils. You can see here I've rolled a small coil on the table and I'm pressing that over where the eyes are going to be. The eyes are going to be on that first horizontal line and I'm going to use my thumbs and also this tool here to push in for eye sockets. This is a little bit of a scary part because you're changing the shape of your clay and because it's hollow it's kind of scary to press in so carve away push in with your fingers or tools and just remember your eye socket is a huge gaping hole in your skull so don't be scared to really put them in the right spot. Now we're gonna make a nose and it's gonna look very Muppets right now. So you can see the brow bone at the top. I'm pinching this small piece of clay rolling it in my hands in a tiny little coil and I'm going to shape it so that it looks like a carrot way too big where it is smaller where that will meet between the eyes and then I'm going to tap it on the table to create that carrot like shape where the nose is going to have the tip of the nose and the nostrils. This reminds me of Bert and Ernie. I don't know why. It's probably the nose and it is a little oversized but it does fit the parameters. You can see how it stops at that horizontal line that I drew. Make sure to look at it from all sides and no this doesn't look like a realistic like beautiful human face but it's starting to build up that bone structure that we'll be using. Now these are super tiny pieces and so I'm using my needle tool because yes you have to score slip and blend every piece of clay you attach no matter how small especially because this clay is at two different levels of dryness. The face I'm attaching it to has dried out more than the little piece that's fresh that I'm attaching here. Now I'm playing around a little bit with expression but I'm going to go kind of straight across maybe put a little dip in the middle there because this is more of like where the forehead sticks out like the brow bone and then I'll carve in or add small eyebrows later. So this is where the eyebrows are going to go but I'm not making like this unibrow. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Hashtag Frida Kahlo but I'm just going to use that as bone structure. So I'm going to score slip blend and then I will smooth it in so it looks like it's attached to the face and not just like an odd an odd eyebrow. You just saw me spritz with a little bit of water just so the clay kind of blends a little easier. The clay hadn't dried all that much but I wanted the two pieces to kind of make friends and be similar levels of moisture. So I did spritz it with water once. One thing about the size of my clay yes this is a mini bust it's supposed to be small but it's pretty darn small and it made it really difficult to sculpt the facial features. So although it's a delightful little sculpture in the end I would make it a little bit bigger. I don't think it really saved me all that much time making it small because in the end it was a lot of work and finesse to get into those small areas. So if you use your imagination looking from the side here you can kind of see how this brow bone is fitting in and I'm going to add those score marks that you saw me do before so I can blend this clay into the top of the head. So this is going to allow the two pieces to be fused together and it's not just stuck on there but the two pieces of clay really become one with each other. So then I'm going to use and you can use your finger you can use different tools to kind of blend those two pieces together. I'm going to take my time to do lots of blending and smoothing here looking at it from all angles turning it around and just making sure it has the effect that I want it to have. So much of sculpting is just smoothing and obsessively blending and rotating it and looking at it from all sides so make sure that you are not just looking at it from one direction. Now that the brow bone is pretty much the way I want it I'm going to attach that nose that I had on there by the score slip and blend method. Now you might know or notice that the nose is simply like a carrot shape it has a point where I'm going to attach that between the brow bone and then the fat part is going to be facing down and once it's attached I'm going to do a lot of sculpting and making the nostrils stick out and making like the point of the nose but I want to kind of add it to the face first because there's some damage that's done when you score slip and blend and so I always do kind of like a rough cut usually a little bit larger than I want it and then I can play around with sculpting it once it's attached to the face. So even though this is a tiny little detail and I am looking at it from the side as well you do want to make sure your score slipping and blending and again this is a rough cut it's not going to look completely like a human nose until you're done with the sculpting part. I'm taking my needle tool and I'm pressing and making those score marks just around and that's kind of over the top but again I want this piece to really blend I want it to smooth into the face and so I just like to do that with my clay and then I just need to take a small little tool here which is the bamboo shish kebab stick and blend all the way around that's what I mean by it not being easier it being smaller it's really hard to get into all these small details just wait until I do the nostril. Just like before score slipping and blending is just the first step then you're going to see me smooth sculpt and perfect my form from multiple angles every time I add new clay. You want to make sure that it's not just attached but you like how it looks and it looks natural and it looks interesting from all sides and whatever effect you're going for works. I really like how 3D this looks it actually looks like a human it still has some alien like features but it's certainly coming a long way so I'm just going to kind of perfect the nose knowing that I made it too big I'm going to shave it down and just trying to make it the way I want it to look now it's time to add some nostrils and I'm going to take my bamboo skewer and I'm going to poke two holes that look very pig-like at first and then I'm going to very gently rotate out pulling the clay to make a more natural looking nostril you don't want to just stick something up there and have like a perfect circle as we know the human nose isn't a perfect circle really the human body is perfect nothing it's just what it is it's organic and then I'm going to use my fingers to kind of push the tip of the nose to make it more pointy and you can kind of play around with um what it looks like so looking at this from the side again not perfect still kind of has like a alien like quality to it but it looks pretty good from the side and I know I'm going to add a whole bunch to it it's not done but it's time to move on and I'm taking a small piece of clay and now I'm going to focus on the lips so you can see they're jutting out quite a lot and so I'm going to be trimming those down and I'm going to include a small top lip and bottom lip um making sure to look at it from that angle is important and I am going to go ahead and attach it even though it does stick out too much because again as it dries and as I move on I'm going to be shaving it down and kind of giving it plastic surgery and all I did was just take a small piece of clay and roll it in my hand until I formed it into the general shape of what I want it to look like this needle tool is really great for attaching small pieces and I'm going to take the same slip and brush tap a little bit of slip into the score marks make sure I have score marks on the face and press the lips in here just like before now that they're attached I'm going to blend first make sure they are attached and then I'm going to spend a whole lot of time figuring out if they are the right size and shape trimming them down blending the edges being picky with the other parts of the body and just making sure they are fitting the face the way I want them to speeding things up even more here I'm just obsessively blending before I add the top lip so you can see it actually looks more human but yes it's too big um so I'm going to kind of press that down and um you know add the clay but then know that I'm going to work with it and make it more appropriate for the face the top lip is going to be a little bit smaller so I rolled a small piece of clay between my hands scoring both sides putting slip on the lips there just because it's easier because it's in my hand and then I'm going to press on the top now you can play around with the shape and size of your mouth is your mouth open is there a tongue sticking out is your sculpture screaming or laughing I'm just doing kind of a neutral facial expression for now but you can still play around um and all you're doing is rolling two pieces of clay to the size and shape that you like depending on the size of your sculpture now I'm taking a small piece of clay and playing around with ears so I just pinched a small piece of clay from my stash over there and then with my hands I'm just kind of playing around with the ears and I need to remember that ears are symmetrical so I'm going to go ahead and build one with the same technique so again I just pulled a tiny little piece of clay I'm hand modeling making sure that the two relate to each other in size and shape and then your ear placement needs to be where the top of your eye meets the top of the ear and then the bottom of your nose meets the other side so if you draw a line all the way around you can kind of make sure it's in the right spot you can see me kind of measuring it out now okay so I'm going to attach the ear using the score slip and blend method and making sure that it sticks out the way I want it to knowing that I can always scrape it off if I don't like it so that's the beauty of clay if you don't like something just scrape it off and try it again so that kind of lines up with the eye and the nose and then it looks like he's bleeding from the ear oh my goodness and then I'm going to repeat my steps on the other side after blending it of course don't forget to blend I mean you don't want your ear falling off you want to make sure you're always blending your two pieces of clay not bad my sculpture definitely has a creepy vibe to it which I'm not mad about I'm going to explore some gore and some like interesting techniques to make it more decorative do you see how my neck was kind of flopping over a little bit so I took a paper towel and reinforced it because my neck is starting to strain and I did speed things up here I'm scoring the same area slipping and blending the ear on the opposite side to make sure my ears are symmetrical now you could add horns to your sculpture you could make it animal like whatever I'm just kind of keeping to the basic human the basic human facial features for now blending a lot and again I did speed this up so if you're wondering why I'm moving so fast this is double time since you've seen me do this so many times before and it is a repeat of the ear on the other side I'm taking the tool and kind of pressing in to make that ear like design and texture which I know I can go back and refine as I go it's not perfect but it really is coming along it really does have facial structure it does have a sense of realism to it so let's get crazy and let's go ahead and make the eyes now I'm going back in with my tool and I'm pressing up to create an eyelid and also score slip and blend instead of doing what I'm doing here where I'm carving out the eye socket and then pressing the clay kind of up to separate it to make that top eyelid but you could also score slip and blend a little tiny eyelid on top now I'm going to take a tiny piece of clay and roll it into a sphere and I'm going to score slip and blend two spheres on both sides to represent the eyeballs this is so hard doing it at this scale I highly recommend doing it larger I wanted to make a mini bus and I thought I was being smart making it so small but it's very hard to sculpt this small not impossible but definitely a challenge so I would make this a little bit larger score slip and blending the eyes is tough because you don't want the eyes to lose that round spherical shape but you do want them to stay attached in there remember that you can carve and you can change the form of each shape as you add it so don't be overwhelmed if you lose kind of that eyelid shape and again you can always score slip and blend a tiny little eyelid on top so I'm going to see if I can get my tool and kind of re-carve that in and then press down this time so that it's touching the eye it's not perfect let's see if I can refine it there but it definitely has the effect of an eyelid and especially with a sculpture this small I think it works doing the same on the other side and as it dries I can take my needle tool and kind of carve in that detail which you'll see me do towards the end of the video now let's kind of sculpt and shape the nose so I feel like my sculpture is now in the plastic surgery studio and I'm just making it thinner making the bridge stick out having the prominence that I want it to and I'm using the loop tool to do that I did speed things up here since it's a lot of just me adjusting the way I want things and it's not really new information except just obsessively smoothing I'm going to do the same on the top of the head I'm going to do the same on the jaw then I'm kind of thinking right now do I want to add hair to this do I want to keep it bald do I want to carve things in do I want to add like a bird sitting on top of its head do I want to give it like a snake medusa like hairdo um there's so many options but something I've really been enjoying lately is the whole trend of gore and just like I don't know like just the body itself so I think what I'm going to do after I adjust um my nose here and all my facial features you can see the clay's dried out a little bit here too which makes it really good for carving um is think about what can I do to the chest to really take it up a notch and make the sculpture not just like a basic human form but really play around with the concept of the sculpture I will say I think I spend I don't know 20% of my time sculpting the facial features and attaching them and then like 80% of my time going in and refining them um so I'm using this ribbon tool so much to um get things where I want them because I was impatient and worked too fast I'm going to create a clay patch on the side of the neck to give it a little bit more support since the head is kind of sinking down in on itself I put score marks I'm taking a tiny piece of clay adding score marks to that so think of this as a splint or a patch or a way to just add a little extra clay for support for thin or weak areas and I'm going to attach it there to give my neck a little bit more stability but also to give it more strength in that area and you can see I'm taking my needle tool and adding score marks because I'm attaching a really more new piece of clay to clay that's dried out a little bit and then that way when I smooth and blend it's really scored to itself and it blends very well so that's a good technique if you have some weak spots or you want to add a little bit more dimensions like maybe cheekbones and things like that so I have a head I have shoulders I have all my facial features on there and now I'm going to start to really think creatively I'm going to cut into my clay here and I want to reveal kind of an open jaw down the neck and esophagus and into the chest cavity at this point you can make this any style that you would like you can give your artwork hair you can give your artwork so many creative details you can keep it simple and realistic and so for me I'm just kind of going with it and I'm removing this area again so I have this kind of gore style bust that shows some of the inside of the body cut open for interest so I'm not going to show you absolutely every single step that I do but this is a technique to create texture as well and don't be afraid to really cut into your clay and really put your own spin on things I always think it's a good idea to have a sketch and lots of visual references so when you get started you kind of know what you're going for so my students always do sketches of multiple viewpoints of how they want their bus to look so they have a game plan going in you could have a theme you definitely want to think about storytelling and message and when you look at your work of art you know what are you conveying to the viewer what is it maybe a personal experience you want to capture or a moment of mythology maybe your favorite character that you've been designing since you were a kid really think outside the box at this point because the human body is such a great vessel for storytelling I've rolled a really thin coil and this is totally a happy accident and not a plan but I thought what would happen if your jawbone was cut into and you could see kind of like your esophagus leading down and so I'm just kind of randomly curling this coil and surprise I love how it looks this again was not the plan it's just what happened I sped things up here I'm going to take that coil that I made I'm going to score slip and blend the easy part is adding the score marks to the surface the hard part is adding the score marks to the coil itself because look at it it's super coiled there's a lot of movement going on so I'm going to place it to kind of measure out where I want it to go and then add those score marks so that it blends a really fun element to play with is texture when working with clay smooth is just one of the textures you can use and I'm taking my needle tool and kind of poking it behind the coil and giving it a really I don't even know what word I would use but a very textured look that is going to create emphasis draw your eye in as if you needed help with that and create contrast for that really nice smooth coil that I added so I want this part of the chest leading up to the neck to look like it was like cut open and it has like laces almost like it's being sewn back together so I am rolling the tiniest coil you've ever seen in your life and I'm going to do a crisscross pattern almost like shoelaces now my students always ask me do I have to score slip and blend even this tiny piece of clay and the answer is absolutely yes especially when you're working with clay from different levels of dryness so I'm attaching it to an area that I created days ago and then this fresh tiny coil that I'm crisscrossing it's annoying but you do need to score slip and blend it so it doesn't dry out and just fall off and so the dry time is more similar so yes it's a lot of effort to score slip and blend these tiny pieces and I encourage my students to work a little bit larger than this yes it's a mini bus but you can do it any size and it is very challenging to do these really small details with clay challenging but not impossible a needle tool will be your best friend you can see I'm also before I'm doing kind of those lace things I'm just giving it a more 3d effect and I love this ribbon tool for carving I'm having a lot of fun kind of playing around with what I want to be carved what I want to add and also what like lines I'm carving in there and you can really play around with clay and figure out your textures I'm going to go ahead and kind of measure out and map and it looks like a zipper doesn't it and then I'm going to crisscross these little coils over there adding my slip and then scoring the ends with the needle tool and really pressing it in to the new piece of clay so that it really sticks it's tedious but small details like this can take your clay to the next level and remember clay is a three-dimensional way to create art so really think about sculpture and levels and creating depth yes you could just like carve and draw into the clay and surface treatment that is certainly a important component but creating these levels and creating depth and creating a sculptural effect will really take any clay artwork that you're working on to the next level so this is as far as I've gotten so far with my little crisscross zipper shoelace opening up into the chest of my poor little bust here and I'm going to move on to the eyes it started to feel like a corpse a little bit because the eyes don't have like an open detail to it so I'm going to go in and give it an eyelid so that it doesn't look like it's I don't know I felt like I was performing an autopsy for a minute there so I want to put some open eyes on this thing so that I feel a little bit better about it and I'm just taking the needle tool you already saw me create the like sphere the roundness of the eye and the eyelid and now I'm just going to redefine that eyelid since it's dried out a little bit and add a little bit more of a bottom lip lid and then a pupil again it's very tedious to work on this small scale so if you have the opportunity to work larger this guy is really cute I like how small he is but working a little bit larger even would just make it easier up to you how much detail you want to add in each each of the facial features thinking about expression and that sort of thing but I'm going to go ahead and let this dry a little bit and it's leather hard so now I'm going to start carving and really refining my details leather hard is when clay has dried out to the point where it's similar to leather you can move it and bend it some but it's really holding its shape and it's perfect for carving so you're going to see me repeat things I've done before carving areas of the facial features smoothing things out and I'm also going to focus on different textures besides just smooth um you can see it's almost like shaving like chocolate and I'm going to collect all those little pieces and recycle them or put them in my slip you can see my fingernail color has changed which meant it's been quite a while since I've worked on this in fact I wrapped him up all Christmas break and then came back to him after and you can see how refining different lines going back in making things really smooth that's going to take your artwork to the next level so this is like a finishing stage making sure that I'm not adding any more details as far as like score slipping and blending but I'm refining details that I already have I like to use the ribbon tool at this stage and I also like to use the needle tool to get those fine details a shish kebab stick works too for some reason the lighting has changed I was filming on my iPhone and it's much darker than the other footage I have I didn't notice until it was too late so sorry about that um one of the cardinal rules of working with three-dimensional art and sculpture is to pay attention to your artwork in the round or 360 degrees I have 100% neglected the back of my sculpture yes it exists I like carved it or I uh sculpted it to look like shoulders and the back of the head but I didn't add any visual interest if this were one of my students pieces I would definitely recommend that they go back and think about visual elements on the back as well but this is a demonstration piece it's to help my students or whoever's watching this video learn how to use clay and create the sculptural bust and so I'm just going to add some texture back there in a perfect world I would maybe split the skull open and show part of the brain there's so many things I could add to the back of this I would love if I had time to make art just for me and make art that showed my creative expression but so many of the times especially with these videos it's just about teaching technique and then my students or again whoever's watching it um they can kind of run with their own creative ideas after learning the basics now that my clay is the way I want it and I'm pretty much done I'm going to let it sit overnight with a bag draped over it not completely wrapped so it can start to become bone dry and bone dry is the final phase of your clay before it goes into the kiln now my clay is not dry you can see the nose the eyebrows the smaller pieces sticking off are lighter in color same thing with the stitching I did so I still have a lot of time for it to dry out it needs to be completely not cold to the touch so I let things dry out at least a week no matter how small they are and what I'm doing now is just refining details and using a brush to kind of scrape off any crispies that are left now be careful at this stage you don't want to like sand it and you don't want to create a lot of clay dust because clay dust is very unhealthy to bring to breathe in so although I am doing some carving and I am doing some dusting I'm being very careful not to create large amounts of dust be careful at this stage because especially the small pieces as clay dries out it becomes super fragile and so just be really careful although you see me going in and carving and kind of gripping my sculpture just know that this is the stage where things can break very easily and when it's bone dry and you're carrying it to the kiln be so careful so many times students knock into things and clay becomes so much more fragile you're used to this like malleable substance and then all of a sudden it's not okay I think I'm finished I've got everything I want in here this is how to make a mini bust thank you so much for sticking around and making art with me and if you're interested in more clay tutorials check these out find my instagram at that art teacher underscore machado to see what my students are making in my classroom and my website thatartteacher.com for all my full-length lesson plans student examples all for free