Day of the Dead Skull Cane
A Tutorial

By Nora Jean Gatine

Your projects will be enhanced if you put a little study into anatomy. If you were doing flowers you'd look in a botany book, right? Well, if you're going to do sculpting, study a bit of anatomy, it will affect your sculpting favorably.

Now you can see how if you were to draw a line across the eyes that those eyes are at the mid-point of the face.

Most people put the eyes too far up and leave no room for brains. It's hard to picture sometimes if the hairline hides how tall the top of the head really is.

When you manipulate a picture like this make sure the end result is the size you want that cane to start out as before reducing. You're going to use this as a guide.

Note: The images from this book are included to illustrate the concept of using an anatomy book only and not to be copied.

This is the skull I was able to come up with to use as my pattern. Cover any picture with some plastic or even a glass sheet, make your cane right over it. It's so easy this way you'll feel like you're getting away with something.

You may print this image to use as your pattern.

If you have an old working food processor that you really don't use any more, sacrifice it to the Clay Pen. This is for a number of reasons: To chop up the clay to get it ready for conditioning;  to warm up the clay quickly so you can handle it; and in this tutorial, to use it to make quick color mixes.

Don't be afraid to chop up your clay in a food processor. If you get insecure do it in short bursts and see what happens. But remember once a food processor is used for clay it is retired from kitchen duties. All kitchen items used for clay stay in the clay pen.