How do I achieve likeness to a face on polymer clay?

Any tips? advice on how to achieve this result.  I have some pics the head is a work in progress.

This is a big question. Maybe these youtube videos will give you an idea and you can go from there:

polymer:


not polymer, but may be useful for technique:

Getting a likeness is not so much a matter of technique, but of artistic training. Unfortunately there's no " trick " or quick fix.
I would suggest that you start by gathering as many photos of your subject as possible. You might then do a little measuring and try to establish the proportions.
But the best thing you can do is to draw them, repeatedly. Drawing is the time-honoured method of training the brain to understand the 3D object you wish to create. You could start by tracing photos : print some off to roughly 1/6th, and trace them with a pencil. Do this a lot !
But all artistic excellence takes time and dedication.

Tony Barton wrote:Getting a likeness is not so much a matter of technique, but of artistic training. Unfortunately there's no " trick " or quick fix.... But all artistic excellence takes time and dedication.

Just for the record, I wasn't trying to suggest anything different. Just thought these tutorials might be helpful.

As already stated, artistic skill is the main factor together with other tips you already got.

However, there are some things on the tool side of thing that can help.

I'm not very good at likeness myself but the best result I have reached doing the following.

Going digital.
Being able to zoom in, using reference images more creative and having access to an undo helps a lot in my opinion. Now days I mostly 3D print but now and then I want to do something in Sculpy and when I do I 3D print a negative and push the clay into it to transfer the face into the clay. Sculpting faces directly in Sculpey have never worked for me in that scale. But hey, I might just miss the artistic skill for it

If I for some reason not could sculpt digital and 3D print, then I would go back to the way I would do it before the time of the 3D printers and use a hard toy/sculpting wax.

My favorite is Toxic Papas wax that I bought probably 20 years ago or so
Don't think that one can be bought any more.

Working in Sculpey is in my opinion hard as the material is rubbery, you can push it and it bounces back a little, even the harder grades, if you push a little bit to hard you deform it etc.

A hard wax is hard as, hmm what to compare to, well a hard wax.
With a metal tool you can shave of material and to remove more material at once you have to heat the tool.
To add material you have to melt the wax and drip it on (unless it's a hybrid with also have clay properties). This gives excellent control when getting the small details in place. You can polish it to mirror finish using a nylon stocking.

A drawback of using this material is that it is not a final material. You have to make a mold and cast the head or maybe just make o mold for the face and press sculpey into it to transfer it to that material.

An fantastic and fun material to work with in my opinion. And also the old school pre digital way of making masters for action figures.

Just to get to some starting point to look in to if it could be something for you you can check out CX5 wax that's a hybrid between a pure hard tooling wax and clay. If heated it gets clay like and when cooled down it's hard. Not as hard as the wax I used but that did not have the clay state option and did go directly from hard to liquid when heated. It has it's pros and cons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zYkiEOrnKs

And yeah, the material is reusable  so once you made you mold you can reuse the wax for something else.

Thanks everyone for replying, I decided to take it to a professional, he did a excellent job, I just finished adding "faux hair" on him and combing and cutting his hair. It was a pain trying to cut off his excess clay just so this head can fit and "look" right on the body.

Happy to hear it worked out. Hope you did not have to pay an arm and a leg.

GubernatorFan wrote:Happy to hear it worked out. Hope you did not have to pay an arm and a leg.

I was worried it was going to be real expensive, but it was 100 dollars in total, I very satisfied with the overall result, next time I will try to do it on my own. I don't won't to post it till I'm finished this this project. Almost finished