Jock Gault, my sculpting mentor in Raleigh - maybe 20 years ago - was a bit of a purist. He was here on The Wall, back in the early days, but went off the grid which created problems, :-). But he felt that if your intent was to do a bust, you started by building the skull, then the muscles and eventually the skin and the hair. You can catch the process sometimes on TV crime shows, but more accurately on internet science videos that demonstrate attempts to recreate what early hominids looked like.
Then once you got the bust done to your liking, and fired, you painted the whole thing black! Really. Then you painted the pure black bust with some kind of metallic paint - I forget what exactly. The final step was to put on a layer of another magic fluid that turned the whole bust into an excellent facsimile of bronze. Very cool.
But here is the important part related to this post: Jock warned us that we would either love or hate the piece as we moved through the various steps. The result of these emotional swings was a desire to either destroy the piece, or stop and not go on to the next step.
That sculpting process was duplicated in creating Masque. Masque started as a photo of the model - a former student and friend from NC State who now teaches Communication in Taiwan. I really liked the photo, but realized I had to pull it into Photoshop and erase most of it to create an outline cartoon of the image. Then I had Staples print a black and white 14x16 version of the cartoon. Next I drew the designs within the cartoon spaces and began to add color, shifted parts of the cartoon, recolored, shifted, recolored, etc. You get the point. And I loved and hated the piece at every step along the way.
I am content - mostly - with this version of the image. At least she has convinced me to explore the process with other faces from other times and places. So, here she is:
