Embellished Skull Sculputures

Victoria Stafford, from Brighton, England, creates these one of a kind skulls. Each one is handmade from start to finish. She has a lengthy creation process. She starts with rotocasting each skull in several layers of resin in her self made mold. After fully curing for many hours, she sands the skulls down and starts embellishing them with various materials. To see more of Victoria's work, check out her Etsy shop, Nonnock.

We want to share your skull art! Be a part of the Skull-A-Day project. Details are HERE.

Dia de la Abby #43: Splatter Void Skull Dress

For the upcoming Skull Appreciation Day, I wanted to make a special painted dress. Also, this means I get to use this dress as a weekly project, since of course it would have a skull on it.

Close up of skull on dress

Me wearing the dress in bright sunlight. There is so much glitter, that you can't easily see the splatter in this photo.

Inside my house, you can see the splatter and skull void better.

This is the wax paper skull I used to create the void. It's neat to see the splatter on a transparent paper. I got two pieces of art out of this project.

I brainstormed to think of an idea that would work. I didn't want to just paint or sew a skull onto a dress and be done. I decided to cut out a skull from wax paper, pin it on the dress and splatter paint all over the dress. By having that wax paper skull on the dress, a void would be left in the shape of the skull. This isn't a perfect technique, since it does allow for bleeding at the edges. However, it was still effective. If I could have found my masking tape, I would have used that for the skull. Contact paper would work too. I made the dress, though you could use something ready made. I covered my dress form with a plastic bag. I put the unpainted dress on it and pinned the straps in place, so it wouldn't slip off while turning the dress. I used a large bristled paint brush (large splatter and drips) and a toothbrush (fine splatter and drips) to create the splatter with watered down paint. I chose a couple "extreme glitter" acrylic paints to mix with the red and black acrylic paints, in small cups. This dress is covered in glitter. I definitely recommend doing this splatter project outside. There will be a large mess on you and everything around you. However, the mess and time (about 2 hours of heavy splattering) is worth it for a one of a kind item.


Every week in the 4.0 year, I will post my own Dia de la Abby posts as well as a tutorial with instructions on how I made my piece. Hopefully you feel inspired by my posts just as I was by Noah's Skull-A-Day 1.0 daily project. Need more of me than just a weekly dose, follow me on Twitter and/or Facebook.

331. Bleach(ed) Skull

Bleach Painting on Denim. I started out making a straight forward image and then decided to play a little more with the medium, since some splatter started to happen in the process anyway. Thanks to my friend Carol for suggesting this medium/material and thanks to Phil and Mady who gave me this jacket when I was in Petersburg making the Rock 'N' Skull!