Thanks for the comments on the mount. Psycho wrote me a good critique on the mount, I'll post it on here so more can learn from my mistakes
Thanks again, Dan!
"I typed you a big long critique the other day to try and give you some pointers and then I went to add a smiley face and when I did it erased everything I typed. I was so aggravated that I said the hell with it. LOL I'm going to start one again and we'll see how it goes.
1st & 2nd pic. I know you are already aware of the eyes but I will say don't use those kind again. I have no idea who thought to call those alligator eyes and I have no idea who looked at those and actually thought they looked good. I can tell that there is a problem with the part of the mouth where the side flaps are. You have it painted what appears to be one color and that is the yellowish beige type color. There is a muscle right below that and I don't know where it is because I can't see it in the picture. It is more plump when their mouth is closed and then start to get smaller once the mouth is open but you can still see it. The other thing is from the side shot it looks as if the throat/ bottom skin looks as if it is sharp as a knife edge. One more thing from that picture that I can see is you have one shape that continues along the whole length of the gator from the tip of his jaw to the back of his neck. You didn't show any definition of change in his head neck juncture. I can't really tell you what you did wrong with the eyes because there is a lack of detail in the pictures but if you want you can shoot me a close up and I will look at it for you if you want.
open mouth straight on picture. Lets move on to the interior of the mouth. This gets tricky because just like the exterior of a gator the mouth interior can vary greatly from gator to gator. Your glottis looks as if it could be wider. It looks a little to small for this gator. You did do a good job on it though. I would also say don't be afraid to mix colors and get a little creative. In our reference pictures sometimes when we look at something and we see something right away like the color yellow for instance. However, even though we know it's yellow we fail to really look closer and see the other colors involved that actually give off a yellowish tint instead of just painting something yellow. Not sure I explained that well enough but hopefully you understand that. I can see that there is some fleshy color still showing in the back of the mouth by the glottis though. Whats funny is, you can find reference pictures of gators where their mouth appears to be that color however there are things we can do to make it better.
Over all great job on your first gator head. I know after reading all of that you probably feel like your head is going to explode. LOL Any way I hope this helps and if you need anything or have any questions feel free to get in touch with me. Everyone of us make mistakes when we mount something, hell even the World Champion guys and gals make mistakes, just a lot less than the rest of us amateurs. Dan"
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