Okay, as promised, I'm going to go into the process I use when sculpting on the road. My commonly-used sculpting materials when I'm home are polymer clay, water clay, and oil clay, and I sometimes dabble in wax. When I travel, especially by plane, none of these are good options for a number of reasons that should be obvious. Epoxy putty, on the other hand, is a medium that can be used on the road because it cures hard in an hour or two, so I can sculpt in the evening, and by the next morning, the stuff I worked on the night before is hard enough to safely get packed away in my suitcase with little risk of getting damaged on the trip home. I brought more tools with me this time than I normally do, because I typically build a bunch of small 28mm and 54mm armatures at home before I leave, which I didn't do. The good side of that is that it allows me to show you the process from the very beginning.

Before we get started, I want to show you two alternatives to the method I will be showing in today's post. I'm going to be doing this "the hard way" today, so to speak. Building a soldered wire armature is the most work of any of the various miniature armature methods I know, but it also affords you the most flexibility. Here are two alternatives:

On the left, you can see a pre-cast armature (sometimes called a "dolly" or "blank"). which are available from a number of sources. The one in the picture above is from Jeff Valent Studios, but similar products are available from Reaper Miniatures, eBob Miniatures, and likely many other places. These are very convenient and easy to use, but they are somewhat limiting in that they lock you in to a certain set of proportions. You can tweak them a little by squeezing the metal to lengthen the limbs or can cut them to shorten the limbs. You can also get more dynamic poses by cutting apart the tab that locks the feet together. You have to be careful with these, though, as you can only bend the joints a few times before the metal will snap, unlike floral wire which can be bent many, many times before it weakens enough to break.

On the right is an armature made of twisted floral wire. This is a convenient method because it requires only a little floral wire and something to cut that wire with. Other than that, all you need are your fingers, and perhaps something to measure the proportions of the armature you're building. Personally, I don't much care for this technique, despite its convenience, because I find it hard to get the proportions exact using this method. When you're working on a figure that's 28mm tall, being off by a few millimeters can be significant. That being said, I know some professional miniature sculptors who use this method with great success, so don't let my dislike deter you from trying it. If anyone is interested, I can do a short tutorial on how to make one of these in a later posting.

The method I'm going to use today is a little more involved, and you will need a few tools before you get started.

First, you'll need wire. I use floral wire because it's inexpensive and readily available at craft stores just about anywhere. It's also easy to bend and fairly strong. I typically use 20 gauge for building 28mm-scale miniatures and larger. I use 24 or 28mm for smaller scale and also sometimes to wrap the thicker wire to give me more surface space for the putty to stick to. The color or kind of floral wire really doesn't matter, but I generally avoid the coated wire and go with the bare silver or gold floral wire because I know the solder will make a good seal with the metal

Since we're going to be soldering to connect pieces of wire, you're obviously going to need a soldering iron and some solder. I ordinarily use a butane soldering iron, but you can't take those on the plane even in your checked luggage, so I'm using my fallback corded electric soldering iron along with some rosin core silver bearing solder.

I also use a small piece of cork and metal pushpins for holding the wire in place while I solder it. It's kind of important to use metal pushpins and not plastic ones, especially when using a butane soldering iron, since the heated exhaust has a tendency to melt the plastic which smells vile and is probably not very healthy for your lungs. Trust me on that one: Get the metal pushpins. You can usually find both of these at office supply stores or in the office supply aisle of a department store.

You'll also need some nippers to cut the wire with, and round-nosed pliers (aka ring benders) to bend the wire and pose the armature.

Finally, you're going to need an armature map, which is simply a diagram of the figure at the scale you're going to be working. Patrick Keith has a good one available on his website here, as does Matt Gubser (look here). Matt is also the author of a book on sculpting miniatures called "Sculptors Do It With Small Tools", which you can learn more about here. I didn't have a printer available to me in my hotel room, so I just sketched out a quick armature map on a piece of paper using a pencil and ruler. I'm going to work in 54mm scale for this tutorial so that you can see what's going on better in the pictures, but the process is identical for doing a 28mm figure. You can see from this picture that you don't need anything fancy (or well drawn), just something you can use to gauge the proportions of your armature.

And that, basically is all the tools you need, so come back next time when we put these tools to use and start building the armature!