Spine And Ribcage Practical Materials

 Here is the progress of the ribcage element of the spine and ribcage sculpture. Like with the spine sculpture, I have used a bamboo cane as opposed to the wire armatures that I had originally planned as they are much sturdier and offer more support for the structure. I have used newspaper and masking tape to sculpt the ribs and a separate structure for the sternum and at this point in the sculpting process, I am quite happy with the strength of the structure and the form of the ribcage as a whole.

Here I have used a layer of burnt umber acrylic paint as the base layer for the spine sculpture and then added lighter brown tones using the dry brush technique whilst also incorporating white and yellow ochre tones as highlights. I feel that this technique is quite successful as it creates a sense of a rough texture similar to those which I have studied from life and I feel that the 'stippled' texture of the mod-roc also contributes to this effect. Although as the paint had dried, I found that the subtle variations in tone were not as pronounced as I would have liked, so to solve this problem I added another layer of tones to further the sense of contrast between the spine tones.