Written by So I realised that if you are not working from a live model, to sculpt a head you really need two views of the person in order to come up with a decent likeness. But where could I find the front and side views that I needed as visual reference? Then the idea of sculpting the portraits of convicts came to me, and I was amazed to find a treasure trove of black and white mug shots from the turn of the nineteenth century through the 1930’s that are available to download from the internet. I spent hours trawling through the websites of US museums of penatentury, and choosing the faces of some extraordinary people, some of whom were murderers, some of whom petty thieves.
Below are the original mugshots and what I created as a result.
Murdered her lover
Jo Pearl Sculpture 