I’ve done figure drawing before, but this class was the first time I sculpted from a live model. Even though this piece is pretty rough, it was sort of a milestone because I put more/finer detail into it than I have into previous sculptures of invented figures and characters. I became somewhat familiar with new tools and a new kind of clay, and of course it helped me better understand some anatomical forms and forces. To name a few:

• The thigh muscles attach pretty low, wrapping around the sides of the knee, and the calf muscles attach pretty high behind it, sort of like interlocking pieces.
• The chest is rounder and meatier on the outside and bottom, whereas the bones are more prominent and the form seems flatter towards the top/center
• There were areas of loose or compressed flesh in the back, which is the type of thing I don’t usually think about. So it was good to have a live model to see this, although it’s not really apparent in the final sculpture. How pronounced it is seems to be very dependent on the pose and the lighting.
• The muscles and planes of the back are something I’ve been trying to learn more about in the past year or so, and the observation that went into this sculpture helped to clarify some things, like the abrupt concave/convex shifts around the spine of the shoulder blade and all the overlapping muscles in the neighborhood.

I still have a lot to learn. I mean this in a general sense, but I also have several specific areas that I want to study in depth, so I’m really looking forward to starting another figure next week when another round of class begins. I think the pose will be more complicated with more bends or overlapping forms, so it may prove even more challenging to ‘finish’ the next sculpture. Maybe I’ll end up focusing a bit more on the gesture or rhythm, but I tend to get pretty interested in individual structures and how things work and fit together.

Oh yeah and this may be slightly amusing or interesting if you’re really bored. Here is a picture of an earlier stage of the sculpture, when he was huge-headed, handless, and hunchbacked due to a fall.

1. I haven’t worked on my hybrid creature sculpt thing as much lately as I would have anticipated, but it is  still around. I had to make some fundamental pose/proportion changes, which means that although it’s been worked on, it’s still in its “early” stages in terms of how detailed it is.

2. Lately I have been listening to The Decemberists’ “The Crane Wife” and some Mountain Goats albums, which are all generally pretty awesome.

3. I “finished” the beginning sculpture class at work with a male figure study. There is a lot missing from it as I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to put the details in that I wanted to, but I will probably post pictures soon. The female sculpt may be considered a lost cause at this point. I missed the 4th class, which might be considered ‘the hand and face class.” I kind of doubt I will revisit it; I may just remove most of the clay and use the armature for another sculpture starting in a few weeks.

4. I was working rather diligently for several weeks on a digital sculpture, but then I ran into some difficulty and also switched to the day shift at work (which a] is awesome and b] demands more energy/focus and active work at the computer), so it has sort of fallen by the wayside. I am going to return to it shortly, and may very well post some in-progress images.

5. I have a lot of images/ideas in my head for upcoming work. I may have mentioned this previously; I don’t remember and am too preoccupied at the moment to read previous posts. The point is, I feel somewhat inspired and creatively charged. I just hope I can find the time to put in some work, don’t get too frustrated with shortcomings/delayed results, and don’t get carpal tunnel.

6. I like semicolons.

Lists are a way to write unrelated paragraphs and not feel bad about neglected transitions or absent coherence.

And here is an in progress image for something I’ve had in my head for a few weeks, related to #2. Not sure what will come of it, especially regarding the pose:

Oh yeah, and keep in mind: he’s just sitting, and he shouldn’t be naked.

I haven’t forgotten you my bloggy little friend.

I have always had difficulty with forearms. Presumably because of the twisting nature of the muscles. And also because I have fairly girly, undeveloped forearms, although that isn’t a very good excuse. I’ve decided that the design for this creature is even cooler than I originally thought, and that the drawing has even more information (anatomical, volume, etc.) than I realized. So it is both awesome and helpful.

One thing of note, perhaps, is that I actually moved three of the supports slightly. I wanted to make the hands closer together, and brought the back right leg slightly forward to better match the reference. So, yay for flexible armatures. I watched some of the behind the scenes/making of stuff for King Kong yesterday and that influenced the decision, in addition to providing some inspiration.

Also, the tail is bent like that so I don’t stab myself in the eye; it’s not a reinterpretation. Safety first!

The sculpture isn’t much to look at yet, but I learned a few things making the armature that I want to share. You may have already known or seen some/all of this before, or it may seem obvious. But that’s kind of the reason I’m writing about it: these simple methods seem to go a long way to speed and ease the sculpting process, and contribute to the strength of the final result.

1. Start by using fairly thin, pliable wire to make a “3d sketch” to gauge proportions and joint locations. This will make it a lot easier to rework and correct things than if you were to jump right in with more rigid wire. You can double back on your wire and make a bit of a mess at this point.
2. Figure out where you’ll have to “weld” wires together–either by tying them together with thinner wire, or by cementing them with epoxy.
   1. Plan to use one continuous wire to make the legs, hips and lumbar/thoracic spine (or perhaps a ribcage silhouette): the ends of the legs should be the ends of the wire, with the torso/spine created from bends in the middle. You’ll also want to leave at least half an inch of extra wire at the end of each leg. But don’t make it yet!
   2. To this main support structure, plan to attach arms/forelimbs, head, tail, etc. For the arms, a second continuous piece will go from fingertip to fingertip, through the collarbones or shoulder blades, with a “weld” where it crosses the spine. If you are making a quadruped, leave an extra half inch on each end of the arms as well. But don’t make it yet!
   3. If the head will be proportionally large or long (elephants, crocodilians, big cats…), you might want to plan to build it into the middle of the arms wire for more strength, in a method similar to how the torso will be built into the middle of the legs wire. If the head is proportionally small (like a realistic adult human), the head armature can be a separate, thinner wire with its ends simply twisted around the end of the torso wire. Important note: The head wire should be 2 or 3 times as long as you think would be required to reach the top of the skull from the weld point with the torso. That way, you guarantee you have enough, with room to pose the neck after the fact. And any extra wire can be rolled into a small a cranial volume for support. Get ready to make it… but don’t make it yet!
   4. I should note that the specific steps above relate to the trend I’ve seen so far for upright, firmly grounded, and bipedal or quadrupedal pieces; if your sculpt is in a more extravagant pose or has unconventional anatomy, I imagine you might make some different choices. But I cannot follow you to that sacred land.
3. Make it! Once you’ve figured out the proportions and structure, create your actual structural support. Use a relatively thick wire (such as 1/8″ for a 12″ figure) for the main legs/spine support. Make sure to leave at least half an inch of vertical wire beyond the end of each leg. The thick wire certainly provides support, but see #5 below for some other serious benefits. Continue to the thoracic limbs, head, and whatever else you’ve got, and weld the wires to the main support where necessary. Use electrical tape for loose, poseable joints, and use epoxy or wraps of thinner wire for more rigid joints. Also, use pliers to get tight bends, because you have girly hands from typing all the time.
4. Drill holes in the base that are the same diameter as your main support wires, and insert the vertical supports of the armature (the extra half-inches at the ends of the legs). For me this was the single biggest revelation. Working with the base this way allows you to take the sculpt off of the base, repose it, work on hard-to-reach areas, switch bases, all kinds of stuff.
5. If you are making a quadruped, or a piece that is wide or low to the ground, or a piece with stubby legs: hot-glue wooden posts to your working base and drill the support holes of #4 in them. This will elevate your piece while working and allow you to get under it more easily. Just think of how easy it would be to scrutinize someone’s genitals if he or she were on stilts. That’s the kind of advantage we’re talking about here. And you can of course detach the piece when you’re finished and put it on a different base for presentation. If you’re into making art for other people, you sellout.
6. Once you have the structure in place, wrap lengths of thinner wire around the thick structural wire. This isn’t for support; it’s something for the clay to grip and stick to so it doesn’t just spin around the wire as you work on it. If you add some bulk to your armature, such as a tinfoil ribcage mass, beer belly, or elephantitic foetus in foetu, you can put a layer of wire mesh on the outside to provide the clay with a better surface to which to stick. You can use more thin wire if necessary to secure this.
7. Um… start slapping some clay on there.

Note: if making a smaller or very thin figure, instead of thick wire, consider twisting together two strands of thinner wire to create the supports for the extremities. I believe you could then epoxy some 1/8″ wire at the leg ends to create the “pegs” for inserting into the base. I’m only assuming this would work; I don’t know from experience because I only make big fat things.

Wow, that was long. I know I have a tendency to use eight times as many words as is necessary to convey a message, but this just kind of underscores how much I learned last night. Hopefully you learned something too. I would put some illustrations/pictures up, but I’ve spent enough time on this already. If you are interested in illustrations, maybe circulate a petition and I’ll consider it.

So… I didn’t figure this stuff out on my own. Thanks to Richard for dropping a knowledge bomb on me.

Oh yeah and the whole “Work in Progress” thing… Here’s my armature and the first layer of clay:

The concept looks to be a hybrid between a lion, gorilla, and alligator (crocodile?), and I stole it from Carlos Huante because I am a terrible and unoriginal person.

The site is running on WordPress now. This wasn’t quite the goal I had in mind when I started tinkering recently, but I am kind of happy it’s where I ended up… I was running a very old version of a blog software called Textpattern that I didn’t use (for a year and a half) and didn’t want to deal with updating. So hopefully using WordPress will streamline some things. Except connecting to a little network of humans on blogger.

I added a bunch of categories for blog posts, although I’m not sure how useful they are at the moment. Seeing as I started this blog in college, and historically used it mostly to talk about art, my life, and things I’m working on, there is a lot of overlap and dubious value for the categories of “life,” “art,” “college,” and “work in progress.” But the exercise of creating categories and categorizing posts made me think about two things. The first is that I need to post a lot more work, a lot more frequently. Which was kind of the point of the site in the first place, and of the recent upgrade/conversion, and I could have told you a long time ago. In fact, I think I did.

The second thing was, I got to thinking about other facets of my life. Things that may be neglected, or at least that aren’t shared openly on the internet. At first I was thinking of interests/goals like running/exercise or trying new foods. Small things that will make me healthier and happier. But there are big things too. Family. Friends. Ideas. Dreams. I feel a little bit disconnected. Maybe I’ll end up touching on some of this stuff as well. I needs me some more categories.

Lots of things have happened. I doubt I’ll write about any of them, with one exception. I just moved to San Francisco to work at ILM. Kacey and I took a road trip to get here. You can read some details, ramblings, and fabrications about it on our blog thing, and see a bunch of pictures grouped by location on flickr. We still have some posts to make for the last few days of the trip, and we are dating them according to when the events happened. So in addition to possibly being slightly confusing in the text, I don’t know what impact that will have on aggregator/feed type things. And we are going to continue posting on there as we do stuff around San Francisco, and future trips.

Oh also… I tried to change this site a little bit, about two months ago. At some point I fixed the old gallery for about two days, then something happened with execution time limits and I haven’t dealt with it since. Considering my schedule is about to get rocked like a hurricane (I start night shift in about 17 hours), hopefully my impending nocturnality or insomnia will allow me the time to migrate the content to somewhere/something whose upkeep will not be in my hands. The same may happen with this text stuff you are reading.

See you soon?