Sugar skull cane:  Brief tutorial.

My canes are available to purchase at my Etsy shop

I made a pretty standard looking skull cane and was quite happy with it.  The natural next step to me was to take it up a notch and try a sugar skull cane.  

Here is my first skull:

That one was pretty straight forward, black and white clay with a translucent background.  Easy-peasy.  The sugar skull would be more complex.  Sugar skulls are generally pretty complex, lots of designs and frilly stuff going on.  The good news is, you want to try to keep it simple so you're not losing detail when you reduce to a small cane.  Simplifying is imperative.  

The obvious beginning step to me was to start with the eyes.  Flower eyes!  I always have a large collection of flower canes on hand, so this was not a complex step for me---simply choosing one.  If you've never made a flower cane, you can find many flower cane tutorials on youtube.  Bunches!  That's a great start for you!  

I wrapped my flower eyes with a border that I made with the help of a triangle disc in the handy green extruder. 

I added a typical skull nose.  At this point i really paid close attention to the size of these features.  If I had them too large, the whole cane would be enormous and difficult to reduce.  I really made an effort to keep the features small and work around them.  

I started adding decorative elements pieces at a time.  At this stage, I noticed that the black lines I had added as decorative flare really just looked like eyebrows.  I didn't want that, so cut them out.  

He is really starting to come together at this point.  I used more flower canes that I already had made to decorate his head, cheeks and chin.  

Now it was just a matter of filling in the face, outlining with black clay and packing the background.