Depth Monster Bust

This is my least favorite piece, right from the start.

The intention here was actually to practice painting an advanced lighting technique. My vision was a scary scene: being in a massive, dark cave with only a small fire on the ground. You can't see very far, and then suddenly this monster head emerges out of the darkness, lit solely by the fire from below.

That kind of scene is classic object source lighting (OSL): painting the light that comes from a source inside the scene, like this fire, so it looks like it is glowing and lighting everything around it. That is the technique I wanted to practice, and I could find many references for it. Lighting from below just felt like a good candidate for it. So I went for something easy and good enough to serve as a canvas, a monster head coming out of a flat black board, with the idea of having the light source beneath it.

As you can see, there is no painted lighting on the final piece, because I scraped it off after a failed attempt (and looking back, giving up after only one attempt was a bit lazy on my part).

I ended up just recoloring it normally, but I did get some clear UV epoxy to test out on the sculpture, which was a good thing. I used it to make him drool, which gives the feeling of intense hunger as he emerges from the dark.