Justin Bieber's head

In my Restauration class, we were asked to re-create a full head out of wax.
How is that useful for us?

Well sometimes, we get bodies that have been in accidents, lost a nose or an ear, or got disfigured....and as much as having a casket closed in those occasion seems like "common sense" to us non-grieving folks, most of the time, grieving families want to see their loved one, one last time.

That's where the wax head comes in.
We have to be able to recreate facial structures as good as possible.

So our teacher wanted us to do as our final project, a full wax head. This way, we would learn about symetry, proportions and all that jazz.

Every year, they pick who ever is famous that year and they alternate between male and female. (last year they did Lady Gaga) So we got Justin Bieber. (wouldn't have been any of my choices, but oh well)

In picture, here's the progress of my head.....unfortunetly, I never asked the teacher what was my final mark on that project, so I don't know if I did well or not...but I did get 91% in that class as a whole. So i'm guessing, I wasn't too bad.

 First we get a plastic skull and add on the wax. Using a basic photograph you add the wax at the places where you need "skin" and try to shape it into the right proportion.

 Started off with the ears. Just did basic normal ears, since I couldn't see Bieb's ears from the picture. The difficult part was to make two mirrored ears from the same size.













Starts to shape the facial structures. Add the nose to have a central point to go from. (note : the nose is the part that will change the most throughout the process, simply to adjust to all the facial structure added later on.)

I found a bunch of pictures of Justin , from different angles. That was very useful since we have to work in 3D.
You take one part at the time and work on it, then you blend it with what you already have done...then you work on another part and then blend that one in...ect...often I had to go re-work a part because it didn't fit anymore with the rest. It's a lot of work, but I must have put under 7hrs on it in total. I would put a plastic bag to cover it so the wax wouldn't get too hard.. If the wax got too hot, it would melt and get sticky. So i couldn't work on it for too long at the time, my hands would be too warm and melt the wax. At the end, I drew in the eyebrows for fun, but for the final projet, I smoothed those out coz normally you would use fake hair. 

This is the final product. I'm happy with it, but i was also sick of it, so i decided to leave it as is. The most difficult part was probably to smooth out the surface so there wouldn't be bumps and lines all over.
It's pretty rare we would get to do a full head in our job....but it was a good exercise on how to do lips, nose, eyes, ears, cheeks...ect I'm hoping I wont get to do a full on face in the future, because it is a lot of work!!!