iSculpt.org

To those who celebrate it: Merry Christmas! I hope you all, regardless of what you celebrate or believe, are having a nice, relaxing day with family or friends.

For me, the holiday falling on a Tuesday has resulted in a four day weekend, and although I have had a fair number of familial obligations during my time off, I've gotten to do more sculpting in the last few days than I have in quite some time. I bounced back and forth between three projects and I figured I'd do an update on the pieces I touched.

Standing Girl Study

Well, I did the other side of the face, and got things fairly symmetrical. I also adjusted the position of the neck. As one commenter posted, it was angled too far forward giving the impression that she was off balance. I like it much better like this, so thanks for the feedback!

I've continued working on the feet some, but have kept the arms off since my last post, and I'm still not sure what I'm going to do about them.

There's still a long way to go on this, but I'm starting to feel better about it.

Standing Guy with Skull

Okay, well, the skull he was holding (not to mention his hand), fell off the armature. I rather liked that skull, but it got squished, so I have to sculpt it over. Because of that, I decided to try something I've been meaning to do for a while, but have frankly been intimidated by. This feller is done in Super Sculpey Firm, and I decided to try doing multiple bakes. I think part of my dislike for polymer clay is that I've been trying to use it the way I use water clay and plastilene; I haven't been working with the material. So, anyway, I decided to bake this guy's head, since the facial features are pretty much what I want. I figured this would allow me to practice sanding and other dry techniques on the head, before moving on to the hair, which can be used to cover up any sanding mistakes.

I didn't do much on the body other than some smoothing and some work on the feet. I also removed part of the base so that I could lengthen the legs just a tad bit more, which necessitated re-sculpting the feet. Unfortunately, I lengthened them unevenly, and now the leg on the right (his left) needs to be lengthened a touch more.

These dry techniques like sanding and filing are pretty foreign to me, but they are pretty cool. I think I'm seeing a whole lot of potential with polymer clay that I never really grokked before now. So much so, in fact, that I decided to bake another incomplete piece I've been working on;

Teen Lantern Chick

I threw out her old head, and baked the body. That worked out pretty well, and I spent a lot of time working her over with sanding sponges, starting with an 80 grit, then going to a 150, then ending with a 320 (and bouncing back and forth a few times). Baked polymer clay can be sanded to a really fine, smooth finish, and with the aid of a dremel, you can get nice straight cuts, at least if your hands are steady. My first attempt at using the dremel was less than perfect, but not disastrous. I was a little more forceful when sanding the legs than I should have been. I snapped both arms and later cracked the leg. The arms are no big deal, I just snipped out a section of baked clay so that I could bend the arms out of the way to sand, then when I'm done sanding the lower body, I can just add fresh clay and re-bake.

The leg break is a little more problematic. I've glued it twice now, but it won't stay glued. The armature wire is still intact, so it stays in one piece, but there's a noticeable seam and I'm not sure how to fix it. I might try epoxy next. It needs to be something that will be strong, but that can be sanded to a similar finish. Another option would be to cut the leg completely off then pin it back in place. I'll do that if I have to, but it seems like a lot of work, so I'm looking for alternatives before I go that route.

Here is her body as of right now. I apologize for the poor picture, but I've removed her from her stand but she still has wires sticking out of her feet, so she can't stand without help.

I'm still finding this stylized, cartoony figure to be a challenge because I keep trying to impose real anatomy on it, but I'm getting better at resisting the temptation.

I also made another try at doing a face. This one is much better. I'm not sure if it's a keeper, but it's considerably better than my first attempt at a cartoony head. I used the heat gun to harden up the features and have tried doing a little sanding on the face, but haven't done a full bake of it yet.

To give an idea of how it's going to look together, I shot this. It'll obviously look a lot different with the hair and hands, etc.:

As I've posted, it's been a bear trying to find time to sculpt lately. In fact, it had been a week since I last sculpted when I clicked on the lamp to warm up clay today. Even though I'm tired and behind on work, I just felt, today, that I needed to go do some, and I'm glad I did. On the other hand, I think maybe I needed the time away from the sculpt. It all came much easier to me today than it has in a long time.

The features on the reworked face are coming together much better than the first face I sculpted. It's still very rough, but it now has a little life and a little character; the old one was sterile and dead. There are many miles still to go on that particular journey, but at least it feels like I'm traveling in the right direction now. I've also started to make some headway on her feet. Or would that be feetway?

The arms remain my biggest question mark at this point. I keep them off the sculpt most of the time now, because the repeated removing and adding has wreaked havoc on them, and I fear if I keep it up, I will have to take the clay off and re-epoxy the brass tubing onto the wire. I'm still unsure as to whether I can pull off the complex, intertwined hand configuration I'm attempting, but there's only one way to find out, huh?

Anyway, here's where things stand today.

I like Deviant Art. It's a portfolio website for artists, but there's also a subset of accounts there called "stock" accounts, where people post photographic reference images for other artists. They range from amateurish and hokey to polished and professional, but even amateur images can function well as reference material, so it's a very handy resource. I don't think this is news to most web-savvy artists.

As a sculptor, my only real complaint about this otherwise awesome (and free) resource, is that very few of the stock accounts provide multiple photographs of the same pose. So, imagine my surprise today when I was trolling for reference images and stumbled upon several high quality 360° flyaround nudes. They're animated GIFs, but that's okay, it's easy enough to split apart the frames.

Note: Links from here on contain nudity

The photographer of said flyarounds is a gentleman by the name of Marcus Ranum (who's DeviantArt account is here; he also maintains a stock account here. I'll save you a little searching time, here are the direct links to the 360° poses:

http://mjranum.deviantart.com/art/Color-Flyaround-66031624
http://mjranum.deviantart.com/art/Carly-Flyaround-58252983
http://mjranum.deviantart.com/art/Rayn-Flyaround-55184171
http://mjranum.deviantart.com/art/Zinn-Spin-48381359

The photographer (who appears to also be a left-brain geek in addition to being a photographer of naked women) has posted a tutoral on how he creates these images, which can be found here.

Marcus Ranum has also photographed one of my favorite models Theda B (although how he got her to dress as a neko cat, I can't even guess). I don't know Theda either, but she has a wonderful, classic body and an expressive face, and I'm envious of Mr. Ranum for having had the opportunity to work with her. I would love to sculpt her someday when I'm good enough to do her justice.

This is a crazy time of year. Yeah, I know that's an excuse, but it's mine, and I'm sticking with it. Actually, it's not that late, I may go down and sculpt a little tonight before I go to sleep, but no progress pictures; my camera battery died and is recharging at the moment.

I've come to the conclusion that I need to draw more. Drawing is convenient - you can do it almost anywhere and it's great cross-training for sculpting. My problem is that my drawings embarrass the hell out of me. I hate open drawing sessions because I hate the fact that anyone can see what I draw, even though I know from first-hand experience, that few things help me get better faster than drawing nekkid people from life.

I don't have the problem with sculpting. I'll gladly work on mediocre sculpts with other people around; I always felt comfortable in open figure sculpting, even when I was first starting and noticeably the worst one in the room. It's a hangup - not rational - but it's hard for me to get past.

On a related note: I have many blogs and forums that I frequent, most of them are sculpting related, but I also follow a couple of animation ones. Which is a little strange, since I'm not much of an animation fan. Oh, I like animation, but I don't have any burning desire to be an animator, and I'm not more than a casual fan of animation in general.

But... the way animators and cartoonists draw is exactly the way sculptors sculpt in terms of what's going on in the right brain. Artists can use one of two broad approaches to drawing, one is to simply recreate what they see, the other—usually called "construction"—focuses on "building" your drawing from component primitive three dimensional shapes, and then refining it. Because of the nature of animation, animators HAVE to use construction to create their drawings and this approach is stunningly similar to sculpting in terms of the way it makes your brain work.

As a result, I've sort of half-ass been doing John Kricfalusi's cartoon course but I think I'm going to get more serious about it. John's the genius behind Ren & Stimpy and he seems to be a nice guy to boot, albeit one with some strongly held opinions about animation and entertainment. His blog is fascinating; the guy knows more about animation than should be humanly possible. Anyway, he periodically posts assignments on his blog for his virtual animation students to do and "hand in" (by posting). That's exactly the type of thing I need to keep me moving forward, especially when life is hectic and I can't find time to sculpt every day. I can manage five or ten minutes to knock out some sketches no matter how busy life is, I just need to keep a pencil nearby.

John's latest assignment was to draw a cartoon toy (yes, a toy), using construction principles, from several angles. I did it:

They suck, and I'm going to do it again, but you can see (from the numbers which specify the order I drew them in) that just in the course of doing these four drawing there were improvements. In fact, I almost kinda like #3, which was, in my opinion, a tough angle.

You can see the original images on this entry on John's blog (scroll down a bit).

One of the interesting, albeit, painful things about sculpting is that sometimes the best thing you can do is destroy work that you've already done.

I've been struggling over the face on the piece I've been posting updates on for a while now, and none of my little tweaks or adjustments were helping. The reason for that should have been obvious: the shape of the face was wrong, so no amount of detail work was going to make it look right. In order to make it easier on myself to fix this, I gouged out her eyes and removed her mouth. I left the nose because I don't think it was contributing to the problem. Once these details were gone, it became instantly and clearly obvious that I had made the face too wide.

This is a problem I often have with female faces in small scale. It never seems to happen to me with sculpting male faces, and not with larger (1/2 scale or greater) faces, but it seems to happen fairly consistently with small feminine faces. So, you would think the problem would have been obvious to me, seeing as how it's happened to me a dozen times or so. But nope, I kept tweaking the eyes and mouth thinking the problem was there.

Ah, well. I'll throw up some pictures later; have to get to work now.

I was gone for a week then, of course, with the holidays and end of year (a busy time for me work-wise) coming, life has been hectic. I sculpted a few nights ago, and didn't do an update, mostly because I was frustrated and angry at myself. The vast majority of the time, when I get to sculpt, I just enjoy the fact that I'm getting an opportunity to sculpt. I don't care too much about how "good" my work is, I just enjoy the solitude and the fact that I'm doing something I love.

Every once in a while, however, I get frustrated. Although I know I've made a lot of progress since I started, I do, at times, wonder if I'll ever get to the point where I'm truly happy with what I produce: Will I ever be "good"?

Fortunately, those times are few and far between, and usually it just takes a couple of days of not sculpting to make me get my priorities back in line. That was the cure this time, and tonight, it just felt good to be sculpting: no frustration, no beating myself up for not being better than I am.

And, at the end of tonight's sculpting session, this is where I stand.

I put the head and arms on, but they're not on permanently yet, and the arms are going to look a little off until I put them on for the final time, because in this pose, the model is holding the arms fairly tightly against her body, which is an effect I can't mimic until I attach the arms permanently.

I started the hands tonight, and am regretting a bit the pose I selected. Those intertwined fingers are ridiculously complex and I'm wondering if I'm going to be able to make it work. We shall see.

Yesterday was so hectic that I never got around to taking progress pictures of the work I did Saturday night and yesterday. This morning, I was on a plane to Des Moines. Well, it wasn't really that simple: I was supposed to be on a plane to Detroit, where I would catch another plane to Des Moines. After a comedy of errors and a day that just kept getting worse and worse, I eventually did get here. I'm here for the week, so don't expect any sculpting updates this week, but I may try to squeeze in a surprise or two while I'm on the road.

And if you missed it, my article on sculpting media is available here. Why don't you give it a read over and let me know if you spot any problems or think anything is missing. Thanks!

So, yeah... I don't get out much. I'm not really known for painting the town red these days. So, Saturday night usually finds me the last one awake in my house, either sculpting, reading, or working on my computer, sometimes doing some of both. Tonight was sculpting, and now a little bit of computer time.

I managed to get most of the torso and legs smoothed out. Not completely, but close. I should have stuck withe just the serrated loop, as the wire-wrapped loop gouged a little too deeply, but it's not a big deal, just created a little extra work for myself. I also had to re-shape her right breast (the one on our left) because I gave it a lower attachment below the ribcage, which is clearly wrong, though it didn't look wrong until I actually started to refine the shape of the upper abdomen and define the depression caused by the rib cage.

I also spent a little time on her face. I can't do small faces like this one in one go like some sculptors can. I have to revisit them a lot. I work on the face until I hit a point of diminishing returns where I'm not improving things anymore, then I move on to something. I actually spent quite a bit more time on the face than you would realize from looking at the pictures below. I kept lowering the left eye, reshaping it, and finding it still was higher than the right. I think I finally got the height of them both about right, but the shape of both eyes still needs a lot of work.

I also just realized from looking at the pictures that her nose is a bit to wide. Oh, well.

Some day, I'd really like to write a book on sculpting. I'm nowhere near good enough of a sculptor to do so yet, but in the course of the last few years, I have done a lot of research and asked a lot of questions about the technology and craft of sculpting. I've worked with just about every medium I've been able to find, have ready everything I could get my hands on about sculpting techniques and tools, and I participate in numerous web forums and mailing lists regularly.

As a result, I've accumulated a fair amount of knowledge about sculpting, and I do feel comfortable sharing that, so I've put together a little PDF that provides an overview of the different sculpting media that I've worked with and read about. It is my hope that it will be helpful to new sculptors, as the sheer variety of sculpting media can be pretty scary to the newcomer.

This version is pretty bare-bones, with no fancy formatting or pictures. I do plan to add those, but my main reason for releasing this at this time is so that people can read it over and let me know what I've missed, what I've forgotten, and (most importantly) what I've gotten wrong. So, without further ado, you can find the link here: Sculpting Media.pdf.

Feedback, suggestions, corrections, and the like can be sent to me.

Just a quick hit-and-run update. These are actually pictures of my progress from last night because I was too tired when I finished sculpting to do a posting. I didn't do much substantive work: I continued raking the torso and legs first with a serrated loop then with a wire-wrapped loop so that I had roughed it up the surface completely. I then started smoothing the surface down with a wire loop (again favoring the right side (her left), but I only did part of the torso and upper leg before I got too tired.

I didn't touch the face last night, so she still looks like a stroke victim, due to the fact that her right eye (our left) is positioned wrong. I wasn't in the mood for detail work last night, not to mention the fact that I'd had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. One thing I've learned is that alcohol and sculpting do not mix, but I felt I was pretty safe doing some surface raking and smoothing. Tonight I'll look at doing some more on the face.

I periodically attach the arms just to check the lines, but I am leaving them off most of the time now. Once I do work on the hands, it will become hard to get the arms off, so I want to get the torso pretty solid before I put the arms on and start really working on them heavily.

Here's what I ended up with