Carving the head shape

In my animation I had decided to do all of the facial expressions  digitally, placed onto the character face in on-top of the stop frame character animation. 

For this reason I sculpted the faces like blanks with no visible eyes or mouth details except marking out where these would be applied digitally.

Initially, I made a scruffy mockup carving out of foam to get a idea of the size of my characters features but it wasn't rigid enough to work as a supporting head for the actual sculpture, 
(as i wasn't able to get the right materials at the time) 


I recreated the base of the head shape with a block of balsa wood as it is light and was about the right size I needed to create the head shape.

Even though it was easy to sculpt as a material, it is also very soft to leave pressure marks in, as even a finger nail should scratch it and could be quite difficult to cut out a solid shape, in a more dense block of balsa being to brittle for a saw but too strenious at points for a scalpel.

For this reason it  has taken me a few days of cutting it bit by bit before I could form it into a ideal head shape.
Using the styrofoam for the dogs head was a bit easier as it was litter to cut with a scalpel.

I then sanded back the remains of the head shape to appear more rounded a swell as cutting off sides to add ears of the character an facial depth.

after smoothing down as much of the face shape as i could i added acrylic paint to create a skin tone over the wood grain i liked the concept of keeping its tone similar to the balsa wood colour.
As i wasn't going to add eyes detail in paint I placed to black pins as guidance as where the eye markers would be on the face. 
I later added a yarn as hair glueing individually little small wrapped circles shapes that gave the appearance of curly hair.