I don't know if this will look familiar to you. Hint: she appeared in a late 70's, early 80's TV show.

Still have no clue who she is??? Sure, bruise my fragile scultping ego why don't you :-)

Anyways, the head sculpt above is suppose to be Erin Gray, or better known as Col. Wilma Deering from the Buck Rodgers TV series.

I downloaded a few pictures from the net and carefully broke apart the individual components of her face. The first thing that stood out were her lips (the way she paints it). If you look at her upper lip, it's thin and long, not collagen filled like Pamela Anderson. Her lower lip is quite full but narrow and doesn't meet the upper lip at it's edges. Her orbital cavity is deep/ shunken with very exotic eyes that angle downward. This was what I had the most problem sculpting. I think I took me 4-5 tries and 30 or so minutes until I was happy with it. Her nose is thin and straight with a high bridge. However, what makes Erin Gray unigue is her cheekbone. It's smooth and tight with very little curvature. It also angles inward where it meets her mandible and flows smoothly out unto a slightly protruding chin.

The original sculpt was done in Premo. I originally wanted to cast the head with a strong RTV with a shore hardness of 60-80. This would allow me to do hollow casting for real rooted hair. Unfortunately, most RTV's on the market are around 20-35 SH and ones I experimented on didn't hold its shape very well. The one that did work was a silicon base RTV which wasn't too compatible with the cure accelerator and thus form tiny surface bubbles. In addition, silicon isn't very easy to paint. In fact I'll even go as far as say that it's a B#%CH to paint (mental note to self ... nothing sticks to silicon!!!). Finally, losing my patience, I casted the head in polyurethane with a glass resin filler to decrease the mass of the piece. The head took a while to paint but if you carefully examine the eyes, you'll notice that the eyelashes are all individually painted .... about 20 of them per eye. I'm still not comfortable painting eyeshadow, but in my defense, I've never had any experience using eyeshadow before :-). I'm tempted to experiment with Floaters which would allows me to drag acrylic paint around. this might offer a remedy to my eyeshadow problems.

The hair was came from a stock called Wavy Locks. It's available at most crafts stores like JoAnns or Michaels. It's thinner and softer than normal doll hair and thus looks more life-like on the smaller scale FC heads. However, it's more difficult to work with since small strands tend to come loose forming fuzzballs. I applied a small amount of Suave styling mousse and brushed it out. However, she now appears to have a minor case of split-ends .... I guess a career with Vidal Sassoon was not meant to be .... sniff, sniff.

Overall, this project resulted in mixed feelings. While I learned many new techniques, I'm not completely happy with the head sculpt. I do take comfort in the fact that it's better than most EP head sculpts, especially after seeing those hideous 9" Buffy pictures :-). There are certain features I need to fix, but time was the limiting agent. The hair was a kind of a flop, but with the wig system I implimented, it can be easily replaced once I've discovered better methods. I also can't find a decent picture of the uniform ..... any help would be much appreciated. Doing this project has given me a greater appreciation for the talents of guys like Jimbob Stelling, Steve Wagner (portrait sculptor for Playmates) and the head portrait sculptor for Hasbro. They make such a difficult task seem so effortless.