Indy bust - (re)start

This time I made some new year's resolutions. One of them - on 2010 I will finish one statue every month. 12 statues from January to December, me? Scary... Some of them new, some of them waiting there for years now, dusty and sad. Like Mathilda... Most of them made from polymer clay, some from Aves and some may even be digital. Actually, I'm ahead of the schedule by now, as I already have two - Liz and Hamster! :-)

I have a list of statues I'd love to have and the only way to get them is to make them myself. No one is making busts of Johnny Depp as Ed Wood from Tim Burton's movie. No one is sculpting statues of Johnny Weissmüller as Tarzan. Or busts from the "Le pacte des loups" or from "The Fifth Element"... I'd love to have something based on Bruce Timm's artwork, but they are too rare and expensive.

Of course, there are several garage kit statues and busts of Indiana Jones. So, why to try to sculpt one if I could just look around and buy one? The answer is simple - most of them look just awful. Actually, I have a folder full of images of Harrison Ford statues, most of them as Indy, some as Rick Deckard. The only decent sculpts are one Blade Runner bust and some official toys, but even big SideShow statue looks too much like Ron Perlman.

It just looks like Harrison Ford may be the hardest likeness, as not even sculpting wizards Andy Bergholtz or Trevor Grove can't get it 100% right (too handsome or too youngish). All the other statues are way off, be it a small statue or life size bust. It's just amazing how different from the screen character can a statue look and still be called Indiana Jones.

I think the challange here is that Ford is not that "movie star handsome". It's hard for me to describe it in English, but let's say there are radically different traits on the same face and they are extremely difficult to balance and to get right. (I think I should do another posting for all the reference materials I have...)

So, long time ago (May 2007?) I made my first try to sculpt Indy. Not much luck. In 2008 I made another try. It was better, but the main lesson from this one was that I really HATE Super Sculpey - it's way too soft for any kind of details or textures. I started over with Cernit, made pretty decent Fedora, leather jacket and left ear... but the face was still off and the bust as a whole didn't look quite right.

Now it's 2010. I'm smarter, I know much more about anatomy and sculpting. I started over again and this time I hope I can crack this bust. If I can't make it, at least I will learn something from the process. One can hope...