A first lesson in looking and sculpting. Ben Swift took us through the techniques of creating a bust, from pinning clay on to an armature ( bust pin) building up layers toe create an effective shaped head. From there we learnt to create eyes, nose lips, the fundamentals of the face. WE worked on our own portraits, photos taken by our colleagues

after an hour or so we were all earning the shapes of heads, how large our craniums were, to measure from nose to ears, ears to chin. I was surprised as i was urged to continuously enlarge the back of my head until it was a realistic shape.

we were then taught the happy techniques of gouging out eye sockets and inserting larger than expected eyeballs, layering the delicate eyelids, creating noses and assembling lips from the constituent muscles ( three for the top lip, two for the bottom)

try as I could i got a grumpy squashed face a very poor caricature of myself

superimposing my eyes improved the bsut slightly, but it is clear how proportions are quite wrong

in profile I was more successful, although the ears are too low down

we wrapped our heads in polythene at the end of a successful and satisfying four hours work. I learnt a lot of measuring, looking and the pleasure of working in clay. My bust was a poor “spitting image’ type of caricature. I hope there is an opportunity to improve it next Friday