First, find your skull
In the Troo Crime thread below, Some Veg linked to a facial recreation of a Viking Shield-Maiden and said he was always fascinated by the reconstruction process. Me too.
In the early days, they would take the actual skull and cut bits of pencil eraser to the correct size for the average depth of skin at that part of the face, glue the bits to the skull and then slowly build a layer of clay until it just covers the erasers.
That gives the basic face. After that, it’s largely artistic license. It’s far from perfect. If you’ve got a completely de-fleshed head, you have no indication of full or thin lips or chubby cheeks. The result was often dead-eyed and creepy. Still, it did sometimes lead to a real life identification.
In the local art club I belong to, a very elderly man applied for membership a couple of years ago. I knew the name. I knew I knew it. I searched until I found a book in my collection from the Eighties which described this very man as the “foremost forensic facial reconstruction artist in the world.”
Well! Naturally, I buttonholed him about it and we had a high old time. He said he hasn’t been that – if he ever was – in a very long time. It’s all done with scanned skulls and 3D models now.
His work these days is rather nice écorché portrait sculptures.
I can never remember the word écorché, so I Google variations of “without flesh” and get some wild answers.
Like this free 3D facial reconstruction software. The catch is, you have to have a 3D scan of your skull first. If you happen to have a skull on hand, there are lots of free programs that will take a series of snapshots and turn them into a mesh model.
Just saying.
November 20, 2024 — 5:57 pm
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