Ecorche/3D Anatomy w/ Rey Bustos - Week 3

Students in Rey Bustos's Ecorche class at LAAFA started week 3 by covering the wire and nails holding their ecorche upright with clay. This clay was the beginning of the ground our ecorches would come to stand on... after we took care of the small matter of sculpting the 3 bones of the lower leg and the 26 bones of the foot!  Fortunately, Rey's design of the ecorche "fleshes out" the right foot, so in all we only had 33 bones to sculpt.  Now that class is over, and I've completed my homework, I can't believe how much we learned and got done this week!  Rey kept his lecture brief so we would have time to get started on sculpting those 33 bones!

Rey advised that we start with the feet, and then work our way up to the tibia, fibula, and patella that make up the lower leg.  To create the bones of the skeletal foot, Rey advised that we use top-view printed anatomical guides and "draw" the bones into our clay. The method really worked!

Photo by Ryan Patterson

Soon we had our skeletal left feet completed.  Rey demonstrated how to create toes, toenails, and tendons for a lifelike look on the right foot.  As a final touch, he added red calluses and blue-green veins in watercolor paint.





Rey gave a final demonstration to show us how to "cook" the two small bones of the lower leg in hot water.  The fibula is a very thin bone that we will eventually wrap in "muscle" on our ecorches, so we used a wire for support.  The patella (kneecap), however, is not connected to the skeleton by any bony structure, so we used a wire to show the patella's "floating" position.  Check out my ecorche's little left fiblua and patella enjoying their hot bath- aren't they cute? ;-)

Ta-dah! Here is my ecorche's newly completed lower skeleton! Check back next week to see what we learn in week 4!