The Kennis brothers used this printed skull as the armature for the reconstruction. Working in clay, they used pins to position tissue and built up the facial tissues layer by layer, incorporating the skull geometry as structural guidance and applying standard tissue-depth estimates to define the overall form of the face. The DNA-derived predictions for skin color, eye color, and hair texture and color were then incorporated into the final appearance of the reconstruction, along with whatever artistic interpretation the Kennis brothers applied to features that the genetic data doesn’t specify — the precise shape of the nose, the character of the lips, the specific arrangement of the hair, the expression on the face.
This last point is important: the DNA predictions constrained some aspects of the reconstruction and left others open to artistic judgment. Dark curly hair is a prediction; the specific hairstyle is a choice. Blue or blue-green eyes is a prediction; the precise shape of the eye is determined by skull morphology and soft tissue estimation. Dark skin is a probabilistic prediction within categories; the specific tone and surface quality of the skin as rendered is an artistic decision made within that constraint.
The result is a reconstruction that gives Cheddar Man a face — a plausible, science-informed face, far better grounded in genetic evidence than the 1998 reconstruction it replaced, but still a face built from interpretation and inference as well as data. Alfons Kennis noted in coverage of the project that people often assume their ancestors would have resembled them. The Cheddar Man reconstruction was, among other things, an opportunity to challenge that assumption with evidence.