having normal problems getting the things i see in my head out into 3d physical/realworld form….

Can see this etherial, eerie, skull-like vampire Princess of Amarna….. started working on the skull in premier, and the skull just doesn’t feel right. very frustrating…

So I thought I would start another skull, this one out of castilene, and see if it is a materials problem or if my brain has melted and drained out of my ear and i will never be able to sculpt again.

typical sculpting process – got sidetracked wondering what a newborn’s skull looks like, so of course i sculpted that instead of an adult woman’s – started laying a face in with chavant, and got sidetracked thinking about Buddhas. End up with a sort of infant buddha head staring at me ….

trying to figure out what to do with it, and decide a short, tubby baby merman seems reasonable and start to lay out an armature using a coil of aluminum wire. Look down, and there is a solemn snail baby peering up at me.

typical. start out aiming at the bust of an adult female and get sidetracked onto a infant garden demon.

So I’m actually rather liking the way he is looking, but noticing that the folk around me are much less enthused. which gets me thinking about how i see him in my head as opposed to how he actually looks. In my head, i see him moving towards me along a path in the shadows of a silent, overgrown garden — his skin is a pearly grey, warm and soft as a human baby’s — his shell is pale bone – like the skull of a hummingbird.

I know i can’t make him move – but how can I make the rest happen? I’m so much happier sculpting in the chavant – but what in the world do I do with it? and how can i make his shell? and the real question is probably —- do I spend months working on figuring these things out on a sculpt that maybe only i will like? or do i squish him down and start again.

and if he has no arms, do shoulderblades make any sense? does he have the kind of wavy margin to his foot that some snails have, or tiny baby toes? and just how far gone am i to be obsessing over something like this?

sigh.

the whole building the skeleton/laying in the main masses thing made the basic body sculpting incredibly straightforward… I like how the kitten looks.

Unfortunately I really didn’t think enough about it as a sculpture in the round – and the back is boring. I’m going to have to try to think more about that for the next one. I also didn’t connect the armature to the stand so I could swing it up in the air and work on it upside down, and its hard to work on the feet without squishing other bits of the sculpt. (I also need to look at cat feet more – how many toes, and where they are on the front and the back feet)

but i’m totally wimping out trying to figure out how to texture/finish the skin. Sphynx kittens have lovely masses of wrinkles — i don’t know how to lay them in. i’m trying to work up my enthusiasm. Finding myself remembering a book I read to my kids when they were small – Catwings by Ursula LeGuin and thinking about bat-type wings for this guy…..

anyway – here are pics in the round for current status….

and here is the boring backside…

been happily re-reading all the Sharon Lee and Steve Miller Liaden books and my inner Korvel seems to have emerged…

ahem.

anyway —

The teachers of the incredible creature sculpture class – Andrew Cawrse and Mike Murnane, approached sculpture from the viewpoint of creating characters for movies – they emphasized correct anatomy, personality/character, and story.

I came away with a list of things to do to improve my sculpts.

1. Learn anatomy. working with what they showed us – I discovered some really obvious truths that i’d somehow ignored till now. If you get the skeleton right – if the bones are more or less the right shape, and the right sizes and in the right places, you can put the figure into the pose you want, and lay on the muscles (the right muscles, the right size, going the right places) and the figure is far more convincing than when you just wing it.

2. use calipers – make sure that all the parts of the figure are the same size as their counterparts – upper arms are each the same length, etc etc… unless you intentionally MEAN them to be different

3. sculpt every day. even if its only a 5 minute maquette, or working on an armature. draw every day -sculpting is like drawing – similar fine motor controls of your hands

4. create a plan. Andrew said that part of one class with Richard MacDonald included writing your obituary, including everything that you hope to have achieved before you die. Be specific —- don’t say “wrote a book” say first book of photographs published december 2011. Then figure out the plan you need to put into place to achieve those goals. then stick to it!

5. Think about the figure you are sculpting. what does it eat? what eats it? how does it reproduce? how big is it?

6. work on a good armature, work standing up (keeps the energy going)

there was lots more – but i’ll be happy if i can internalize these for now.

I’ve been making maquettes, though not one a day. I keep drawing the same 2 muscle shapes over and over. sigh. drawing is definitely a challenge for me. I’ve been working on creating armatures – interesting, i always thought the wires should follow the bones of the skeleton – but in the class, they said no, the wires might happen to follow the bones, but mostly they have to be inside the sculpt – you can build the bones in place as long as they are supported by the wire.

I ended up doing a few maquettes of cats. (In large part because the cat who adopted us over Christmas kept sitting on my books when I tried to look up animals, chewing on my keyboard when i tried to look up animals on google…. it just was easier to sculpt the blamed cat) which reminded me how much i love the look of Sphynx cats.

so i’ve started a cat. not sure if it will stay all cat – i played with giving it a fish tail (catfish — yeah i know, my humor never matured either) and actually its a kitten – large head, smaller body, larger paws…

at the class – they said one of the first things to do is block in the larger masses. the skull, the pelvis, the ribcage. so that is what I did first.

I discovered that when i sculpted a careful cat skull first – the head almost sculpted itself (couldn’t resist, laid in some rough ears, eyelids, nose and lips). i tried to guess where the ribcage should be – then tried to fiddle with the legs. Discovered that i had used too small of aluminum wire for the legs – and that my guess on the ribcage was too far back. Finally ripped the cat apart, redid the armature with stronger legs, and invested in some books on cat anatomy.

Now i’m reading about scapulas, humerus and clavicle and preparing to lay in the sternomastoid, levator scapulae ventralis and clavotrapezius – and amazing myself that the words are starting to have meaning for me.

Its going to be interesting to see where this goes.

by the way – this creature is a small predator who eats insects, small rodents and tunaflakes. the sculpt is roughly life sized, it is a juvenile, curious and intelligent – it is hunted by larger creatures such as bobcats, coyotes and its still trying to decide if the peacock in the back yard is food or danger. It may have grasping hands and prehensile tail – not sure yet – it lives above ground, preferring trees, computer tables and tops of display cases.

added some more steps to the process I’m using to make ball jointed hands.

the tutorial continues with information about sculpting palms and fingers

this figure needed articulated hands… I’ve done one before, and they are incredibly time consuming and nitpicky – but I love them. As I’ve been working on this one i’m realizing that i’d never tried to connect the hand i did before, to a figure …. so i’m having to rethink some things.

But anyway – here are pics of her with her first hand roughed in. now comes the painful finishing of each individual joint so that the hand works well and looks ok. I think there are about 15 joints per hand, or thereabouts. next pair i’m going to make a little differently.

and trying to get myself back to sculpting…

here are a few pics of the very large torso…

cleaned up the body armature a bit, roughed in the arm armatures and 1 hand (need to really work on the elbow joints – they look terrible) and worked on the neck…

its been awhile, hasn’t it? I think i’ve been trying too hard to sculpt things to other folk’s tastes. Which is a good exercise, but which seems to have stopped me from sculpting at all. I looked back, and I’ve mostly just been tweaking joints on the 2 bjds for around 6 months now.

not good.

So tonight I sat down and started an image just for me. I managed to squick my daughter a bit – but I’m glad I did it…. now to make the body for it …. and then its time to sit down and start that blamed torso suspension piece I keep saying i need to get going…

no clothes… I was going to post a warning like i do on bjd forums when i post pics of figures with no clothes, but then….
hmmm, i see a trend here…. i think i’ve done 1 figure with clothes (nope, make that 2 figures with clothes) in the last 3 years or so.

maybe i need to give that to myself as a challenge – do 2 more with clothing. preferably something awesome like sculpted kimonos and steampunk buckles and leathers and gears…..

ahem. ok, stop the mental rambling, back to the post at hand…

Saranbileg is a head for Therese Olsen’s Twiglimbs 2 body…. i posted pics awhile back where she was preparing for casting, and Saran looked like a terracotta soldier…

here she is in resin with a faceup by Meagan…

I do love how alive they can look in the resin… makes a pleasant contrast to the dreamlike white of the premier clay…

madly emulating bone…. i wonder, if the dragon’s spine is roughly 27″ long, and i have until about July 20th, i guess i need to be applying bone at about 1 1/2″ per night. of course – that doesn’t include the ribs, the feet and talons… hmm, don’t think i counted in the neck on the dragon…. and the lady isn’t finished yet. and there isn’t a base yet…

sheesh.