iSculpt.org

Getting on a plane in a few hours, so don't expect any more updates until the end of the week.

Sculpting the human figure is a daunting task when approached for the first time, and no part is harder to sculpt than the face. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, and foremost, the human face is something we see every day. While modern social mores (in America) require us to cover the better part of our bodies in clothing most of the time, we are always exposed to faces. We see them all the time, and are very familiar with them. If something is wrong with a drawing or sculpture of a face, we know it instantly. Someone who has never touched clay or wax or picked up a pencil to draw can look at a bust and tell you when something is off. They may not be able to identify exactly what is wrong, but they will know that something is.

Secondly, the face is very complex. The human face is the only part of the body where muscles exist for no other reason than to communicate. Through the rest of the body, muscles connect bone to bone (by way of tendons) in order to allow movement. The bicep muscle, for example attaches to the humerus and the radius (it also attaches to the scapula), and, along with several other muscles, helps the forearm flex and pronate. This is the formula followed through most of the body: muscles connects to at least two different bones and by their contraction, contribute to the movement around a particular joint.

That's not the case with the face. Oh, there are muscles in the face that work this way - those that move your jaw - but the majority of the muscles of the face are small muscles that connect skull to skin, and exist only to convey emotion or to help you form the sounds that make up speech. All these little muscles contribute to very subtle changes that convey a wide range of emotions that other humans seem to understand instinctively.

But, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Before a new sculptor attempts to tackle the nuance of emotion, it is important to get the basic structure of the head correct, and there are a few things almost every beginning sculptor gets wrong. Let's take a look at the skull:

If you're a new sculptor, you should become very friendly with the skull. Draw it. Sculpt it. Buy a plastic or plaster skull for reference. You need to understand this shape well if you're going to sculpt heads correctly. Nothing I say can substitute for diving in and sculpting or drawing because your right brain learns only by doing and only through repetition. Words and letters are symbols, and by definition, the domain of the left brain.

There are, however, things that can be pointed out using words that can shorten your learning curve a bit. For today, I'm going to point out one of those things and one only. If you are new to sculpting, I want you to focus on this particular thing every time you work on a face, because almost every new sculptor get this wrong.

See the teeth? Okay, now here's the one fact you need to keep in mind to get the mouth right: the curve of the lips follows the curve of the teeth, not the curve of the skull. Let's look at a skull from the bottom:

Notice that the teeth form a much tighter curve than the curve of the skull? It sort of looks like a tennis ball inside a lopsided bowling ball or giant egg. Please notice that there is a pronounced difference in the circumference of these two circles. Your lips follow the smaller circle, not the larger one.

From the middle of your face, your lips go back much more steeply than most new sculptors want to believe. If you hold a straight edge, like a pencil, or a ruler, gently against your lips without pressing, you will see that the corners of your mouth are quite a bit further back than the straight edge. This is even more pronounced in a smile because the zygomatic and risorius muscles pull the corners of the mouth even further back along the curve of the teeth.

As with many parts of sculpting, the secret to getting the lips right is to understand the underlying bone structure, so make sure you keep looking at a skull in addition to your other source material. Unfortunately, reference photographs do not often show the draft of the lips very well, so working from a model is extraordinarily helpful when you're first learning. The great thing about sculpting faces, is that models are much easier to come by since you don't have to ask someone to take off their clothes and assume an uncomfortable position for a length of time.

My lack of posts for the next several days is not due to some strange illness. I'm taking a short, and very much needed vacation. Unfortunately, a few days after I get back, I'm heading out for two weeks of work-related travel, so my sculpting time will be limited. I am going to bring some epoxy putty and dental tools and will have my camera. I plan to do a tiny bit of sculpting and may manage a few posts in the next few weeks, but I won't have internet access until next Thursday, and won't be able to complete the video tutorials or do any work on my larger-scale sculptures for almost three weeks when I get back from work travel.

I'm going to try and get one good substantive post in tonight before I leave, though.

I started editing the video, and I'm really unhappy with it. I thought I had the same lighting setup as the previous one, but this one has a yellow cast and is grainy. It's functional, but not as good as I'd like, so I'm thinking about re-shooting at least some of the scenes with better lighting.

Sorry!

Well, the video is done for tutorial #2, but it's not the video I had planned to shoot. My intention was to show you one way of building an armature that can be used on the modeling stand from the first video tutorial. Since making that video I've received a number of questions concerning just how large of a sculpture you can build using that design of modeling stand.

And the honest answer to that question is "not that large." It's a great design for anything up to about a twelve inch standing figure. Every bit over that you go, it's going to get a little wobblier, because that threaded rod is thin. Most sculptors I know switch over to building their armature stands out of galvanized steel pipes when they reach a certain size - the kind you can get in the plumbing section of a hardware store, and they custom build the stand out of various pipe nipples, couplers, and elbows for each armature.

In video tutorial #2, I show you an alternative design for an armature stand that gives you the strength of steel pipes, but maintains some adjustability and re-usability, though it's not as adjustable as the last stand we built. I'm not a big fan of having to do the same work any more than necessary, so I like this design better than custom-building armature stands for every sculpture. I'm not actually sure who came up with this design; I borrowed the idea for it from a picture I saw somewhere, but I honestly don't remember where I saw it or who posted the picture. If you know who's design this is, please drop me a line, as I'd love to give credit where it's due.

Anyway, the way you build an armature doesn't change substantially between the two different designs of armature stands, so I thought it made sense to show you this design before moving on to building the actual armature.

But I will get around to that soon, I promise. I know a few of you are anxious for that video, and if I could figure a way to eek out a few more hours in the day, I would have done that video by now as well.

I hope to get this one edited tonight or tomorrow and posted in the next day or two.

This single parenting thing is definitely keeping me busy; it's been harder to find time to sculpt than I thought. I did sculpt last night, but not what I had intended to. I helped my kids make props for their halloween costumes. I made two magic wands and a lightsaber handle. They're not exactly Hollywood quality, but the kids seem happy with them. I'm hoping tonight to do some work one of my pieces.

Wow... crazy day. Got an awful lot accomplished around the house and spent a lot of quality time with the kids, but I was going from early morning until pretty late without much of a break. Once I got the kids all in bed, though, I was determined to do some sculpting. Between the last session and this one, I took the Teen Lantern piece almost completely down to metal, and I'm liking it better, though I am still not happy with it. I feel much better about the pose and body language after the revisions; it doesn't feel nearly as static as it did, but there are still parts that I don't fully grok the shapes - where my brain is having trouble interpreting the two dimensional reference image into a solid shape.

I am actually starting to like it from about the abdomen down quite a bit, and feel like I'm starting to understand the shape the upper body needs to be. The one thing that is really throwing me is the fact that the forearms are so much larger than the upper arms, which is how it is in the reference image. With the legs, having the distal portion of the limb be much bigger wasn't hard to accommodate, and seems to flow well. But with the arms, I just can't picture a way to go from skinny teen-girl upper arms to those Popeye-esque forearms without it looking wonky. Large forearms are not particularly feminine. The the artist who drew the piece managed to pull it off, so I know it's possible, but I'm not getting how yet.

On top of that, I have a baking quandary, owing to my lack of experience with this media and my tendency to start many sculpts but finish few. I know that many professional sculptors who work in polymer clay do multiple bakes, but I'm always scared of doing a bake because it seems so permanent. I don't know how difficult it is to change the piece after baking, and I just don't know when I should do a bake. Part of me thinks that once I get the basic shape right, I should do a bake and sand and smooth to see if any surfaces need to be filled or any of the lines modified. Doing so would also give me the flexibility to work without the armature stand, which would let me work more easily on several parts of the sculpture such as the back of the feet, the buttocks, and between the shoulder blades. But I'm a bit scared of doing it, and just don't know how to judge whether it's "done enough" for a first bake. I think I'll need to post to some forums to get some advice on that account.

It did feel good to sculpt. I try not to go more then one day a week without doing some sculpting, or at least some sketching if I can't sculpt, but circumstances sometimes make that an unachievable goal. I wanted to keep going, but I've got to work tomorrow, and I've got all the various kid-duties that my wife ordinarily handles along with what's shaping up to be a murderous workweek, so I'm going to exercise restraint... unless I can't sleep.

I had intended my first "rant" to be on the topic of sculpting frustration. Oddly enough, the very act of writing this blog seems to be working miracles in terms of dealing with my own frustration, and as a result, my motivation to tackle that subject has waned a bit.

Tonight, I had intended to sculpt, but seeing as it's after 11:00 my time, and two-thirds of the children who are home with me are still awake (jeez, I hope my wife doesn't read this), I'm pretty sure it's not happening tonight. But, I've got them at least in their beds now, so I can spend a few minutes thinking and writing about sculpting.

Instead of a short blurb on what I did tonight, you're getting a long "rant" on what I didn't. You have been warned; feel free to stop reading now.

One issue that is really difficult for many sculptors, but which hasn't really been a problem for me, personally, is that of inspiration. "What do I sculpt?" seems to be a question that many sculptors find difficult to answer. This has never been an issue for me for two reasons. First, I simply haven't mastered the craft to the extent where coming up with ideas for new sculpts is a problem. If you don't often finish your sculpts, your inspiration for those unfinished sculpts remains valid and re-usable, and inspirations seems to come faster than completed works. Secondly, and more importantly, is that my main motivation for sculpting is a very deep-seated fascination with the human body. I could spend the rest of my life doing portraits and nudes and be quite soul-satisfied. There is such an unbelievable variety in shapes, forms, and surface details among different humans that you could never exhaust the possibilities.

Though I do do sculpts with clothing, props, and accessories, the human body is my primary fascination and that fascination is the core around which my sculpting "life" (such as it is) has been built. One source of inspiration that I have more than once considered interpreting into sculpture is the photography of Leni Riefenstahl, specifically her work documenting some of the indigenous people of the Sudan called the "Nuba" and the "Nuba Kau".

I do not wish to embark upon a discussion of the morality of Ms. Riefenstahl. Certainly, she supported and masterfully propagandized one of the most horrific governments in modern memory. It is understandably difficult for many people to forgive someone who helped promote Hitler's regime, and I would not ask nor expect anyone to do so.

But Ms. Riefenstahl lived to be 101 years old. She directed "Triumph of the Will" at the age of 32, and I think that it is important that if we undertake to judge another person, that we do so by judging their entire life, not just a single high-profile portion of it. Leni Riefenstahl was only one of millions of "good Germans", and we only know her name because she was extraordinarily talented and was possessed of tremendous vision, neither of which, in and of themselves, make her any more vile or despicable than her fellow citizens.

However, because of the way she spent the last fifty years of her life, we have knowledge of and a record of something that would otherwise have been lost. Ms. Riefenstahl seems to have made an honest friendship with and to have been honestly concerned about the plight of the Nuba, something that would seem to contradict her support for the eugenic policies of the Nazis.

The Nuba and Nuba Kau were fairly isolated groups of indigenous people who lived in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. By the early nineteen-nineties, the very way of life of the Nuba and Nuba Kau was being threatened by the second Sudanese Civil war which started in the early nineteen eighties. Even as late as 1991, it was estimated that there were 1.3 million people in the various Sudanese tribes that constituted the Nuba. They are now, for all practical purposes, extinct. They are not all dead. Some of them, and their descendants still live, but the survivors are not recognizable as Nuba. At least, they are not recognizable as the Nuba that Leni Riefenstahl documented.

Cultures that had survived unmolested for hundreds of years disappeared in the blink of an eye. By the early nineties, many Nuba women and children had been forced into slavery, and the Nuba men were forced to fight in a civil war that shouldn't have concerned them and in which they didn't believe. Most of the Nuba men were forced to accept Islam with a gun pointed at them or their loved ones. The Nuba, one of the last groups of people who were truly free from serious encroachment by modern strife, modern religion, and modern "values", was obliterated by the senseless violence of the second Sudanese Civil War, though most of us in America didn't even notice.

If it weren't for Leni Riefenstahl, we wouldn't have even known they existed. They were a physically captivating and beautiful people with fascinating traditions and a view of life very different from the modern western view. Some would use the word "primitive" to describe them, but that is a word loaded with preconceptions and inherently conveying a belief that one way -- the speaker's way -- is best. The Nuba culture and way of life worked tremendously well for a large group of people for an incredibly long time. It resisted change for decades because there was no benefit to changing; their culture and traditions worked well for them and it would be hard to argue that the people who were Nuba are better off today for having been "modernized" at the point of a gun. It is hard to imagine two systems of belief more different than traditional Nuba culture -- which saw no shame in bodies or sex -- and modern Islam.

You can see a documentary from 1993 on the then-vanishing Nuba culture called "The Right to be Nuba" here on YouTube. As a general rule, I have no plans to discuss political or world matters in this blog and am about as non-political as a human can be. But I can't help but be sad when I look at the stunning photographs that make up Leni Riefenstahl's legacy. It seems wrong to me, on more than one level, to think that these beautiful images from not so very long ago, represent a culture that no longer exists.

Someday, when my talent is up to it, It is very much my intention to do one or more sculptural works based on the Nuba and Nuba Kau as Leni knew and documented them; the way they existed before the Sudanese Civil War killed so many of them and devastated their culture.

If you can afford it, Leni Riefenstahl's Africa is a visual feast that you really shouldn't miss.

Well, my wife just left. She's taking one kid to Florida for a little mom and daughter alone time. She'll be gone five nights, so that leaves me to fend not only for myself, but for the remaining kids. It's a good thing in many ways and it certainly makes me appreciate the difficulties facing single parents - those people who managed to do everything for themselves and their kids by themselves every single day. Pretty damn amazing, if you ask me, so hats off to you single parents out there.

Anyway, my sculpting time for the next six days is probably going to be more limited than usual, especially with work being as crazy as it has been.

That being said, I will be doing some sculpting, and posting about it, even if I have to go back on caffeine to do it.

Computer Arts Magazine has a cool tutorial up on anatomy. While it's supposedly for "3D Artists", there's some good advice in there for any sculptor.

Rey Bustos is an artist, art teacher, and a true anatomist. His site has a number of awesome aids for learning and reinforcing your knowledge of anatomy (hint: click the "Rey's Anatomy" button). Check it out.

I did a little sculpting. Basically, I re-worked Green Lantern chick's body completely, removed all details and distractions (like her hair). I realized I was not following my reference art - I was re-designing when that wasn't my intent.

So, after giving myself a kick in the pants, I stripped it down to the basic shape, and I'm happier with it, though I've still got a bit to go before the pose and shape is right - the sculpt is still much more rounded and organic than the reference image. But, it's a step in the right direction.

You know, when you do most of your sculpting late at night, giving up caffeine is probably not the best idea. But, I'm a bit of an addictive personality and I have a tendency to over do caffeine, so periodically I have to give it up just to reset my system.

Today, was my first fully caffeine-free day in quite some time. Unfortunately, now that I've got the kids to bed, I'm just too darned tired to sculpt tonight. I'm going to try crashing early and see if I can get a good length sculpting session in tomorrow evening.

It's amazing some of the stuff that you can find at the Internet Archive, especially in the collection of scanned books they have. Here are a couple of gems that I've found that might be of interest to figurative sculptors:

Modelling and sculpture by Albert Toft (1911)
A history of ancient sculpture by Lucy Mitchell (1888)
The proportions of the human body by Bertram Windle (1892)

Okay, a few posts back, I told you about the Photos and Prints collection of the Library of Congress, which has some really great reference and inspiration material. One thing you might notice, however, if you check it out is that a lot of pictures only have a thumbnail or low-resolution JPEG image available. However (and I hinted at this in my last post) in most cases, there is an uncompressed, full-resolution TIFF image of the scan available online if you know how to get to it. Now, in some cases, especially with images that were scanned a long time ago, the uncompressed file is no larger then the JPEG image. But in many cases, you can get a much higher resolution image using this trick.

Let's take an example: Muybridge's Human and Animal Locomotion plates. How about this one:

LOC doesn't allow direct-linking to the catalog pages, but it's Call Number LOT 3309, plate 62, or just do a search on "Muybridge" and it will come up. You can choose any of the Muybridge plates, it doesn't have to be this one. When you get to the catalog page, you're going to see a little tiny thumbnail, like the one above. Clicking it does not take you to a higher resolution version of the image, and there is no larger version available, according to the catalog page. Well, that's frustrating, isn't it?

But wait! Right click on the image an open it in a new window, or copy the image address (url) to the clipboard. You'll see a URL that looks like this:

http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3c10000/3c15000/3c15100/3c15103t.gif

Okay, now, the Library of Congress follows a very consistent naming standard for their digital assets. If you want to get to the highest resolution version of this image available, you need to make two changes to the url. First, change the word "service" to "master, and then change the last five letters from "t.gif" to "u.tif". So, your new URL will look like this:

http://memory.loc.gov/master/pnp/cph/3c10000/3c15000/3c15100/3c15103u.tif

Go ahead and give it a click, but be prepared to wait; these uncompressed tiff files can be large. But you'll be rewarded for your wait with a very large high-resolution copy of this image, suitable for printing. Pretty cool, huh? This works with ALMOST all of their scanned prints and photos. In a few cases, you don't have to change the word "service" to "master", but just change the last five characters.

Had only a short sculpting session today, due to work craziness, but short is better than none!

My big accomplishment for today was decapitating my little Green Lantern girl. As you can see here, she really lost her head tonight:

That was more than a little unnerving, but it turned out okay. I just garroted her with a piece of 28 gauge wire, and then slowly worked the head off of the armature wire. I'm going to have to do some resculpting on the hair, but so far, it's only minor touch up. It may turn out that I need to remove the hair entirely to work on the face properly, but I'm trying to avoid that since I've got a fair chunk of time in on sculpting the hair. But, if that's what I have to do, I'm going to do it. I didn't get to do too much on the face, but I did obliterate the eyes so that I could concentrate on the symmetry of the face and mask.

I just noticed from looking at the picture that the changes make it look like she has no nose. Oh, well, first things first. Once I get the basic shape right, then I can focus on the details. I didn't take a picture of her profile, but I did a lot of work on the face in profile and am much happier with the the way the lower part of the face looks from the side now. I'll try and get a shot of that next time.

I spent a little bit of time on my other sculpt today as well, but not much time. Mostly on the face, although I did a little work on the lines of the body.

You can see the face is a little cleaner and more solid. It even looks okay from this other angle - the symmetry isn't bad. But the body... well, the body needs some work. You can tell that I've been concentrating on certain angles and ignoring others, such as this one:

I was feeling pretty good about the torso, but just look at it from this side! And that arm as well. Next sculpting session, I need to focus on the profile and three quarter view and fix that torso.

Thanks for riding along!

Most sculptors I know have a lot of anatomy books and also a lot of reference images collected from other places. Some of these images are used for inspiration, others simply to help them know what a certain kind of body looks like in a certain pose. Although images created for this purpose, such as those in anatomy books, pose reference books, and online resources such as 3d.sk account for some of those images, we also tend to find useful references in other places.

To give some examples: Sculptors who create very muscular figures often make extensive use of bodybuilding magazines and books. Old catalogs are a great reference source for clothing from a particular time period, and screen captures from movies can be very helpful when trying to capture a likeness of characters from that movie.

I thought I'd post a couple of more obscure reference sources that I've used.

Harmonious Development of Women's Bodies

The first one is another old book I stumbled across last year. It's called "Harmonious Development of Women's Bodies" by Alice Bloch, and the English version I have was published in 1938, although it's a translation of a German book from a few years earlier. The book was sold as a "how to" guide, giving exercises and information on building a healthy and attractive body for girls. Much of the information and science in the book is outdated, but this book does still offer something of value for the figurative artist.

You see, Germany in the 1930s is the birthplace of the modern naturism movement (aka nudism, aka running around outside with no clothes on), and Ms. Bloch appears to have been a part of that movement, or at least influenced by it, for the book is chock full of pictures of nude young women outside performing the various exercises she discusses. The quality of the printing is less than perfect, but is good enough to discern a decent level of anatomic details, and there are some really wonderful pictures in here of gymnastic and dance poses.

Since this little book was published in 1938, its copyright has expired, so I'm able to legally post scans of all the plates. If you would like a digital copy for yourself, you can find a PDF with all the plates here. Standard warning - there be naked bodies at that link, so don't click Mrs. Grundy!

Tax Dollars at Work

Another unlikely resource for finding reference images is, believe it or not, the Library of Congress website. Hidden deep down in in their prints and photos collection are a large number of useful reference images that have been scanned and made available thanks to your tax dollars (if you live in the U.S). Among other things, you'll find scans of several of Eadweard Muybridge's original photographs from "Human Locomotion" and a lot of pictures of the old-time bodybuilder Eugene Sandow.

The search engine is capable if not, perhaps, as robust as something like Google. Despite its simplicity, you can have a lot of fun searching for reference images and inspiration here by plugging in different keywords. In a later post, perhaps I'll let you in on the super-secret method for getting to higher resolution files in some cases.

Part of my reason for starting this website was to force myself to take pictures of the pieces I'm working on. For some reasons, photos allow me to be more objective and see things that I miss when looking at my pieces in real life. Taking pictures on a regular basis is a good habit to get into for a sculptor. I do not claim to understand why it works, but it does. Try it.

My problem of late, has been that when I do take pictures, usually intending to post them for feedback on forums or mailing lists frequented by better sculptors, I tend to see so many glaring mistakes and problems that I never post them out of shame. I tell myself that I'll fix the most glaring mistakes and then take more pictures, and I usually do, but... well, it's a vicious cycle, because (of course) when I see the new pictures, I spot more things that embarrass me. So, my thought is that if I make it a habit to just take pictures at the end of every sculpting sessions and force myself to post them ]no matter how bad they are, that hopefully it will get me out of this funk I'm in where I hate everything I sculpt.

Now, just because I'm frustrated, don't feel like you shouldn't criticize me. I adore people who rip my work apart. Oh, not people who are intentionally mean without giving any useful information, but people who actually see issues, especially correctable issues are a huge help to me. Seriously. Feel free to tell me every niggling problem you see, even if they're obvious. Much of the progress I've made sculpting has been directly facilitated by people ripping my work apart. You can even do it anonymously down in the comments if you like.

What's Behind Door Number 1?

So, here we go. Let's start with a figure study I'm working on. This guy's about eight inches tall and done in polymer clay - Super Sculpey mixed with Sculpey III. The clay is a lot firmer than I normally use, which made doing the basic build-up slower than I'm used to, but I must say I'm liking the firmer clay now that I'm starting to get more into detail work.

This piece is nothing particularly fascinating; I'm not trying to be especially creative with this one and it exists only to help me learn. I'm trying to create a fairly faithful interpretation of some reference photographs I have. I'm still in the fairly early stages, which tends to be where I like my pieces the best.

This is the first piece I've done where I've made part of the armature removable: His head comes off, which is why there's that big crevasse around his neck. See, he can do party tricks:

When I first blocked him out, his legs were too short. I've lengthened them some, but think I might need to do some more. I think the short legs came from the fact that I was working seated and looking down on the sculpture on a lazy-suzan on a table. When I'm working on my modeling stand, I almost never have this problem, but I make the legs short fairly consistently when I work seated. Guess if I were smart, I wouldn't work seated any more, huh?

I'm really liking being able to take the head off and work on it separately. I feel like I have a lot more control working on the face like this, rather than having to maneuver my tools in there, especially with an awkward pose like this. You can see from the closeup that the face is still very rough, but the basic shape isn't too horrible. There are some definite symmetry issues, and the eyes are not quite at the same level, but those are very fixable issues at this stage of the game.

And What About Door Number 2?

Ah, yes. Well, the other item on my workbench is an oddity for me. It's one of the few times I've tried to do a non-realistic figure. This is a cartoonish figure that I believe is from an animated television show; she's the Green Lantern from the future or something like that (I don't watch television - I just stumbled across the image while doing a Google search and liked it). I'm trying to capture the spirit of a very stylized two-dimensional character in three dimensions. I thought that a cartoony figure would be easier than a real one to sculpt; I was wrong. I'm having a really, really hard time creating this much simpler character than I do with realistic ones. I keep unintentionally veering shapes towards real human anatomy, making the shapes more complex than they should be, and creating a figure that's not right as a caricature or as a realistic piece. I'm still hoping I can save it, as I like the character and the pose, but I'm really frustrated with it in general.

This piece is also about eight inches tall, and done in Super Sculpey mixed with Fimo.

I think I have to remove her head. I'm really unhappy with the face, and I just can't get it the way I want it with the hair and the arms where they are, but I'm a little intimidated by the prospect of doing it, what with all that hair and stuff, and the fact that I have to get in there with wire cutters and cut apart the armature without destroying too much work. Anyway, here's what she looks like at the moment:

If you want to see the reference image I'm using, you can look here. This one has really got me down. I don't know why I am having such a hard time with it, but I'm going to keep working on it despite that. I've got a bad habit of not finishing sculpts, and it's a habit I need to break.

Alright, well, I think that's enough rambling for me for one night. I've gotten past a major hurdle for me by posting these. Feel free to post comments below if you wish to, and I'll try to get back to posting more links and resources and maybe even a new tutorial.

A few years ago, I came across some old, musty books by a British photographer named John Everard. After leafing through them, I bought the whole lot immediately. The books, called Artist's Model, Second Sitting, and Model in Movement had publication dates from the nineteen fifties, and were sold as reference books for artists although, I'm sure, given the societal constraints at the time, that they were sold to many non-artists as well.

The general format of the book is that each two page spread consists of one full-page photograph of a model in a given pose. The other page in the spread shows that same model in the same pose from nine twelve different angles covering a full 360° rotation and usually with more even lighting. It is, in many ways, very similar to the more recent "Virtual Pose" series of books.

Though some of the images are dated, the quality of the photography is quite stunning, evoking a feel reminiscent of the old hollywood portraits taken during the thirties and forties. The books are primarily filled with female models, though there are small sections in each book with pictures of men and children. Some of the content will appear just downright silly to the modern viewer, but overall, these books are an excellent reference source, and I'm glad I found them.

I recently stumbled across a PDF file online that contains most of the plates from the first book "Artist's Model", and thought I'd post the link to it for those not fortunate to own the printed version. This version does not have the male models nor the pictures of children, but it does have the bulk of the female images. You can find the 50 meg download here.

This information was buried down in my first post, but I thought it was worth re-posting:

If you're looking for the iSculpt tutorials, you can find video tutorial #1 here. The print version is available here I've got two more in the works and hope to get them out in the next week or two.

A top notch sculptor, putty pusher, and very patient teacher just dropped me an e-mail to remind me of a few other excellent reference links that I missed in my last post.

www.deviantart.com - great for stock photos as well as cool artwork for inspiration

http://www.tsofa.com/forum.php - The Society of Figurative Arts is a great place to brush up on your anatomy.

http://smartflix.com/store - Tons of GREAT video rentals on sculpting and drawing - $10 a pop but well worth it IMHO :-)

http://www.conceptart.org/wiki/doku.php?id=references:figure - Conceptart.org is a fantastic site, this is their figure refrence links page... good stuff Maynard ;-)

http://www.posemaniacs.com/blog/ - Great Japanese site with skeletal poser poses.

Note: If you want to drop me an e-mail with links or information, please also let me know if you want to be credited in the blog entry. I'll gladly post a link to your home page or other site if you wish, or at very least give your name. I know not everyone likes publicity, so please let me know your preferences when submitting.

One thing that it took me a very long time to really understand deep down, though I had heard it from many other sculptors, is that you MUST observe as you sculpt. Working too much from memory to soon in your development as a sculptor will ingrain some very bad habits very deeply and those will be hard to break later.

Working from a live model is the best way to wrap your head around the shape of the body, but for most of us it's just not practical to have a model most of the time. Because of this, photo references become essential.

Here are a few online resources (I'll post some dead-treeware references (aka books) in a later post) that you might want to check out. Right now, I'm going to minimize commentary on these resources and just provide links, but I do hope to do full reviews of many of these services at some point. All of the links below are likely to contain nudity, so do not click if that sort of thing bothers you.

Free
Character Designs Photosets is a resource website for artists. Among the resources provided are several photosets of people in different poses and in different outfits.

Spectrologue is primarily a stock photo resource but at this link you'll find four photosets of female models taken in many different poses and from many different angles.

Not So Free
3d.sk is primarily focused on providing images for digital sculptors and for use in texturing digital models. Despite that, there is a very wide variety of models, both male and feamale, of all different ages ages (adults only) and races, mostly nude, but some with clothes and props. Be forewarned that some of the photosets have fairly graphic nudity, including very close-up shots of genitals. 3d.sk has a couple of companion sites that might be of interest, as well: female-anatomy-for-artist.com and human-anatomy-for-artist.com which have content more targeted at traditional media artists.

posespace.com is a site run by the publishers of the "Live Model" series of books. Instead of a subscription service, they offer individual poses for sale. It's hard to compare the price to 3d.sk's subscription model, but at $5 per pose, you could drop a pretty penny to get the entire library.

Virtual Pose has been around for a while in book form, but they also sell individual poses on their webs site. At 9.95, these individual poses are rather on the expensive side.

Yes, there are many, may more, but these should get you started and were the first ones that came to mind. I'm a bit of a reference junkie, so I'll be posting more links to reference images as time goes by.

I thought that I'd get things started here by posting some of my regular online haunts. These are sculpting forums and mailing lists where I've found excellent people always happy to give advice or feedback to other sculptors.

Shiflett Brothers Forums - The Shifflets are a pair of really kick-ass sculptors and generally good guys. They run a forum on their web site which is a great place to get feedback and information.

The Clubhouse Sculpting Forum The Clubhouse is a resource for the collectibles and garage kit industries. Don't be fooled, though, many of the most talented sculptors work in those industries, and this is one of the best places to find sculpting talent online.

The Clubhouse Tutorials Forum They've gone and taken all sorts of tutorials, supplier lists, tips and tricks posted over the years and put them in one place. This is a storehouse of sculpting knowledge!

ConceptArt is a website for, well... concept artists. But, they include both 2D and 3D artists and have a forum just for sculptors. You'll see a lot of really cool sculpture here if you poke around, as well as some great tutorials on sculpting and toomaking. They have digital and traditional sculpting mixed into a single forum, but we all seem to get along there pretty well.

1ListSculpting is a mailing list primarily focused on sculpting miniature figures, such as those used in wargames, but there's a lot of information here even for sculptors working in other scales and media.

Have I missed any good forums or lists? Drop me a note! I'm happy to include any good places where sculptors meet, regardless of what kind of sculpting they do. Whether you consider yourself a dollmaker, garage kit sculptor, fine artist, or whatever, we're all sculptors and all have things we can learn from each other.

My apologies to people who have been checking in on a regular basis. I had intended to get this site up and running back in September. October is now half done, and I've come to the realization that I just don't have enough time to do this the way I originally wanted to. I write software for a living so, of course, I had big plans for writing the software for the iSculpt.org site from scratch.

I've come to the painful conclusion that I simply don't have time to work, sculpt, meet family obligations, create sculpture tutorials, and write a whole new website from scratch, so I've decided to go with a pre-written software package to get things going. The scope of this site will be fairly limited at first, but I hope you find what's here useful. It is my plan to post interesting links that I've found and new video and print tutorials, as well as blogging my life as a somewhat mediocre sculptor in hopes that doing so will drive me to become better, both by forcing me to be objective about my work, and by getting others (namely you) to give me feedback.

If you're looking for the tutorials, you can find video tutorial #1 here. The print version is available here

I've got the next two tutorials planned out, but am not sure how quickly I'll be able to put them together.