I started work on Creation 010-002 and am nearly done with the body. After that, it’ll be onto the hands and the feet as the head is already done. This entry is going to be on what I came across learning wise on this sculpture. When I ‘m creating the armature of the sculpture and am attaching the hip wires, I normally have them be about an inch long
but once it came time to cover the armature with clay and I actually started shaping the body I realized that 1 inch is too long as the wire was poking out the side of the hip (pictured below) which can be fixed by adding clay on top of it and covering it up but I prefer not to do that
the reason I made the choice not to add more clay on the side of the hip was because her hips were already wide enough (pictured below) and I didn’t want to add more to them but since I can’t go back in, cut the wire shorter and put the sculpture back together, I’m going to have to add more clay to cover up poke-through.
Something new I also started on this sculpture was to only cover the armature up to the knees and the elbows and leave the rest of the wire showing, the forearms and the shins. The reason for that is so I can shape the torso, detail it, have everything ready to attach the shins, or cover the wire for the shins, after. What I do is before I cover the shin wire with clay, I pose the leg to its half-way point, then I cover the shin wire with clay, shape and detail the shin to make it look like a shin and I would do this to the other leg right after. In this case, since the leg is going to be bent underneath her, it’d be smarter and easier to attach the feet then bend the leg to its final position which would do two things; 1 ) it would save you the trouble of having to attach the foot on a leg that’s already posed in it’s final position thereby making it very difficult to blend and sculpt around the ankle since she’d going to be sitting on her leg in this pose 2 ) it would add realistic creases and bends in her skin behind the knee.
Another sort of way of using one of these tools I discovered was very helpful and really contributed to creating the realistic body curves was to use the metal tool (pictures below) to actually scrape or shave off access clay and shape the body to a more desired shape.
Now, with my schedule in particular, right now, I’m only able to sculpt when I get home from work thereby only giving me about 4 hours to sculpt per night. You can’t get a sculpture completed in this time and have to put or store the sculpture away until the next day. You can’t really just leave your sculpture hanging on the sculpting stand as it will collect lint and dust and we obviously don’t want that. A temporary solution I came up with was to put the sculpture in a casserole dish; the dish has cotton balls on the bottom to create a sort of mattress so the sculpture doesn’t get any indentations from being on a flat surface for hours, on top of that layer of cotton balls I put a single sheet of hand towels as they hardly shed any lint. On top of that hand towel is what I set the sculpture on and then just cover the dish with its cover to prevent lint and dust
It works very well for me.
The last thing I wanted to talk about was regarding making your sculptures look believable and realistic in shape. Something that I really saw the benefit from that I had heard many sculptors talk about was using references for what you’re sculpting. So in this case I used references of the female body so I could sculpt the curves, the shapes, the skin creases, the muscles, etc. to make my sculpture that much more eye catching and in my opinion it’s really showing through in this sculpture. You can find references just by simply doing online image searches for these things and I think you’ll find it’ll really help guide you in the right direction.
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