Well, based on some feedback and advice from Katherine Dewey over at the Shifflett Brothers forums, I decided to add some more epoxy putty to the legs to give them a little more strength. Katherine says she was "worried" about my use of a single strand of 16 gauge. I've never met Katherine in real life, but I"ve read an awful lot of advice she's given over the years on various forums and have read her book, and she just knows a tremendous amount about sculpting, and does not seem prone to worrying unnecessarily. If she's worried, I'm thinking I should be, hence the additional putty.

more epoxy on the legs

Then I started doing very basic build-up of the body. Before I got too far, I wanted to put a small ball of clay on the head, and harden it with a heat gun to give me a firm foundation to sculpt the head on. To do this safely, I wrapped some aluminum foil around the head to protect the clay I already put on the rest of the sculpture. If I had been thinking ahead, I would have done the head before I started bulking out the body.

Oh, hai! Can I has hard head?

I was originally going to do a standing, typical hero-grade pose, but it just wasn't working for me... seemed too static and not quite right for the character. So I played around the the pose some. This is where I ended up last night:

This is actually coming together fast for me. Oh, I've a long way to go even before I establish the basic body shape, but I'm not a very fast sculptor, and I'm happy with the progress I've made so far. I'm not sure about the proportions, though:The measurements seem to be okay when I take them and I used my marks for the joints, but something looks wrong to me - the legs look too short and/or the torso too long. I suppose it could be the angle of the legs, but I really think something needs to be fixed before I get too much further along.