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Writer's pictureFredo Declán Hernández

Sculpting Mouths Technique

One of the other areas that I really wanted to find a great way to sculpt was the mouth area as some ways that I had tried didn’t work out as well as I had hoped, meaning the mouth didn’t look that way I was wanting it to. So, in sculpting today, I came across a technique that so far has proven to be a fantastic method for me to sculpt mouths. When I have the ball of clay rolled into a head, I start sculpting the eye area and simultaneously work on the nose. Once those areas are at a certain stage, I noticed that there wasn’t much room (chin room) left for sculpting the mouth.

So I added another layer of clay and shaped that into a chin. What I came up with at that point was to actually cut out (carve into) an area for the mouth with the exact o knife leaving a hole. From there I would use one of my favorite wood modeling tools to push clay from the upper part of the mouth (were the upper lip is) and push clay up creating a “lip line” which I then further define the lines of the upper lip, using the same wood modeling tool,

and as I completed the upper lip, adding the certain details I wanted, I noticed that this particular method of sculpting the mouth area was giving me far more realistic results than the other methods I had already tried.

Here’s a few pictures of how that method worked out for me ….


Here are some pictures of the other mouth sculpting methods that I didn’t particularly take to ….


I wanted to add some pictures of the finished mouth with the new technique. Below, you’ll find that I finished the bottom lip by just pushing / indenting the clay to create the chin then defined the edges of the lower lip and once the lower lip was done I lightly pushed the mouth closed and really think that for my preference, this technique adds so much more depth to the mouth as opposed to just “sculpting the mouth on the surface of the clay” ….


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