I’m excited to share this little tid-bit.
Earlier when I started sculpting, I had told myself I wanted to keep my sculptures at approx. 6″ or smaller. (sigh) that didn’t end up being the case with my first few pieces, sadly. They ended up being over 7″ which in my eyes was too big for the “effect” I was wanting to portray with my pieces. So, I got an idea from a TuT I purchased from Apryl Jensen about mermaids and to make the fins, she had a print-out of the fins to use as a guide.
It took me a little while before the light bulb went off in my head. Then here it came – an idea (YaY). I thought, “I can do that with the entire body of my sculpture to ensure it stays at a certain height !”. So it began. I took some reference pictures of humans and opened them in an image editing program, Photoshop. I then displayed the rulers along the edges of the document for accuracy (as seen below) then right-clicked on the ruler and selected “inches” so the ruler would display the inches. After that it’s was just a matter of resizing the image to align with the ruler and the measurements / size I wanted that particular sculpture to be.
Notice how the lines of the images are approximately at the 4″ mark. That’s how you keep your sculpture to scale at whatever size you choose.
Then you simply print out the document. and lay your armature wire on top of the paper and use the paper as the guide to keep your armature at that exact size (pictured below)
Here I bent the armature at the joints after I had created the armature so I know where the joints are.
I’m aware a lot of you don’t have the privileged to own Photoshop to do this, and I haven’t done the research on what other free programs offer the capability of displaying rulers in a document to do “measurements” of this kind.
For those of you who do have Photoshop, this is a very basic function of Photoshop and I’m pretty sure most of you already know how to do this – if not, let me know and I would be glad to create a detailed TuT on how to accomplish this.
Side-note: The armature pictured above is of my new Interim Creation which will be my very first faerie and my very first 4″ sculpture (that’s the size of the above armature). That’s a separate blog entry to come.
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