havreberg.com

Okay, don’t get excited. I know I’ve been dragging my feet posting stuff, but I have in fact been working on things. On and off… it’s already February and I don’t have as much to show as I would like, but I have been working on some ideas and compositions that I’m pretty excited about. I will talk more about digital models another time though. What is of interest to me at this moment is that I started a new sculpey piece last night in maquette class.

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.

New design. New engine. Same nonsense.

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.

This probably isn’t exciting for you, but I just fixed the site’s gallery. I’m not sure why this didn’t happen sooner; it was just a memory allocation issue and only took about 45 seconds to fix. There’s nothing new in the gallery yet, just old artwork and pictures. So you can check those out if you want. I have some new stuff in the works to post up eventually, but I’m considering taking it FARTHER THAN EVER BEFORE, so it may take a while. You can call me captain cop-out.

Okay. It’s been over a year and a half since my last post. I apologize. BUT if you cared enough to visit this site during that time, then you are probably a person I’ve talked to since then. I certainly hope so. If not…. well, you’ve probably long since given up on me and aren’t going to bother coming back now. I am a terrible person.

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?

A bit of progress