Clay head model (Work in progress)

If your friends don’t want to pose for you – make yourself a new friend 😉
A while ago I decided I wanted to fix my chipped coffee mugs and after looking for the best option for patching them I decided that using air-dry clay would create the lowest risk of poisoning myself (and, if you’re curious, for sealing the clay on mugs I used Pentart Decoupage Varnish & Glue in silky shine variant).

Surprising as it is, you can’t buy just 3 pinches of clay (afaik anyway), so I was left with the whole package of potentially cool stuff I could make out of it. It was then when I remembered that a long while ago I bought a wig/hat mannequin that was supposed to be a head and face reference for my drawings but I’ve never used it because… well, let’s say I’d prefer a slightly differently shaped face. But now I had clay and I could actually fix that!

The work is still in progress but below you can see the pictures of how the work is going so far and I have to tell you that I didn’t expect it to be so relaxing (and frustrating at times!). And I’m actually pretty excited to see the final result and atm I’m just wondering if I should paint it when the model is done – that may help a lot with drawing faces but on the other hand I think the pure off-white colour of clay of the sculpture looks pretty good too. What do you think, to paint or not to paint? 😉 Let me know!

PS. I forgot to take the photos of the mannequin BEFORE I put it on the surgery table, sorry!