First A Dinosaur And Now - Professor X?!?

Yikes - well these pics are at least a week old (if not, perhaps, a little... more) but that's actually because I've been too busy sculpting to post :) (although not all of that sculpting was on CJ....)

So when we last left our intrepid Prawnling I'd roughed in the basic sculpt and it was onto the fun of refining things! :)

For which I decided the best place to start was at the top!

Sadly this meant popping off those cute temporary skewer stick antennae and undoing a lot of the nice details I was happy with when I first sculpted CJ's head before Christmas....

Rake - smooth, rake - smooth and thus...

Is it just me, or is CJ starting to look a little like Professor Xavier?

Kojak?

Egghead?

His profile was looking pretty good so I decided to compare it to my reference pic again in Photoshop. But in playing with the opacity filters over the two pictures I realized that it was sometimes hard to tell what was the edge of the reference photo and what was the edge of the sculpt.

So I took a fresh layer, lowered the opacity, and traced over the reference photo with a nice, bright colour like so. Then I repeated the process with my latest photo of the sculpt.

Then I set the opacity on both to 50% and overlapped them
(I had to change the green to blue because otherwise the red and green cancelled each other out where they overlapped. This is me failing Colour Theory 101)

So now the trick is to adjust the sculpt till the red lines match up with the blue ones (at least the head and torso lines - the "scaffolding" that's holding CJ up actually prevents me from sliding the legs into the exact same position as the ref pic).

I have had a few second thoughts about using this Photoshop overlay method quite so much. On the one hand it's quite helpful in showing me errors. On the other hand I wonder if it's really helping train my eye to analyze the shapes and forms correctly or am I just using it as a crutch?

Yet it's a common sculpting trick to hold a mirror up to your work in order to recognize irregularities in the sculpture that your mind has otherwise become desensitized to. Is this not just a high-tech mirror? I wonder...