Standing woman figure sculpture

I'm back from my trip to Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina where I attended a sculpting workshop by John Sherrill Houser. If you have the chance to visit Brookgreen, the grounds and sculptures on display are lovely and I wished that I had more time to really take it all in. The lighting, however was very difficult to work under, a combination of small spot lights and skylights. When the clouds drifted in the lighting was reduced. We had a week-long pose with a wonderful model that we worked from and the last day, we had the model bring in some dresses. I have been wanting to work on clothing so was pleased that the class agreed to this approach.

 We had and armature and board and were sculpting using Chavant's Le Beau Touche. I've worked with Chavant clay before and it's quite good. Brookgreen had a warming box and when warm, it is easy to manipulate.

I would add, however, for the way that I work, I think that this clay is better suited to larger pieces. Since we were working with a 16" armature, the clay was a bit soft for my style of working. At a larger size, I would think it would be well manipulated by fingers and would work quite well. It did stick to tools quite a bit and I found that I had to keep baby wipes handy to to clean my tools down quite a lot.

The images shown here are at the end of day two and I have probably about 10 hours of work.