Refining the Cheek Area in Wax Sculpture

Series Summary

Carving a likeness from stone has preoccupied human artists for thousands of years. In the culture of ancient Greece the great marble statues of human nudes began to exhibit a refined sense of musculature and posture. During the Middle Ages the popularity of the ideal nude waned, but reliefs depicting people, religious art, and decorative sculpting developed in many parts of Europe. In the Renaissance the larger-than-life sculpture of the human form was reborn. Some carved from clay, which through a complicated process becomes a bronze sculpture. Others, however, sculpted the human from rock, chipping and polishing until the shape emerged from its stony cage.

In this free video series, professional sculptor and artist Dan'L Terry shows you how to sculpt the human head from hard wax. In the refining and polishing stage, you must add detail, smooth edges, and perfect the smaller parts of your sculpture. Dan'L teaches you how to add brow creases, add life to the eyes, sculpt the muscles of the neck, and add hair strands to your wax sculpture. Finishing and knowing when to stop are key to any artistic endeavor, and Dan'L helps you decide how to finish and refine your wax head.

Video Transcript

"O.K. now we're going to start refining the features of the cheekbones and the basic overall face. We've got the general stuff here, now we've going to start the refinement. This is when I like to bring in Charlie to remind me what the basic body of the bone structure is underneath because now we are going to start dealing with that. Notice that if you look here we've got this area here under the eye on both sides this is very narrow and when it's together now skin covers all this but that creates that sunken area in our cheekbones so we want to deal with those sunken areas and start carving some of this away to help create some of that more natural look of the human being. So I?m going to start carving right under here and see where the underside of the cheekbone is here and carve away a little bit to start refining that overall shape and do the same on the other side and carve away from your hands under where that cheekbone goes. Again go to the drawing whenever you can in order to help discover how much to cut away and at this stage I'm usually just going to scrape rather than spend a lot of time actually chipping away at major parts. Start to refine the shape, give it more real, refine the area of the chin near the nose this area here, just keep going until you have it looking more like a human. Like somebody once said, how do I carve and elephant? It's pretty simple, carve away everything that doesn't look like an elephant."