As In Life, Also in Death

This was the skull sculpture that I made for my daughter's partner. I thought it would be interesting to show a series of photographs so you can see how I built the sculpture.

I can't seem to rotate the pencil drawing above! I used a medical annotated picture of a skull to copy.

This was the first couple of layers. The idea was to put a candle behind it for effect.

This is the finished version on its side for you to get an idea of how far it stuck out from the canvas. The material I used took some time to dry, but at certain stages you could manipulate it with your fingers to obtain the correct shape.

This is the finished version. I broke up glass mosaics and stuck them around the eye socket and around the painting. It represented the character who died but was still 'shining' as in life. The character had been killed by a blow to the head; that's why I put a dent in the skull's head on the right-hand side. They wanted to put candles behind it, but I had obviously done too many layers for it to show through, so I punctured the painting in various parts. I then bought some lead weights to put in the back of the painting so that it could stand up.