-
-
The Reserved occupations were also crucial, and fought the war too..... just in different ways.
ALL did their important roles under incredibly difficult conditions..... ARPs,Police,Firemen,Factory workers,Shipyard workers..... the list is huge mate,as i`m sure you know,and we should all thank the heavens for them standing up to the plate :thumb2: ,
You should be equally as proud of them,which i`m sure you are.
Andy.Comment
-
Fantastic project Neil , watching with great interest, cheers tonyComment
-
Land Girls, Bevan Boys etc, etc, - the list goes on and on! For every 'bayonet' there is a disproportionate number of 'support arms'. Gawd bless 'em!Comment
-
Thanks for all the interest chaps.
This is our pose
The first thing we need when sculpting a figure is an armature to support the putty. I make mine from twisted copper wire. If you just use a single strand of wire the putty doesn’t necessarily stay in place and often slides around the wire. The twist gives a key and helps the putty to stay put where I want it. I always have at least one wire going through the foot into the base. The dip between the shoulders is just to make it easier to drill a hole for the head armature wire.
The wire goes through the base plate into a handle. My handle of choice is a pin vice, but other people use a bottle top or a cork. It just needs to be something you can hold comfortably for a long time. You don’t always need a base plate, although I have one for this figure. And you need to be able to put it down without damaging the sculpt- I have a rack that I 3D printed.
The armature looks very rough and ready but it’s actually more precise than it appears. Like any foundation, if you get it wrong you store up trouble for yourself later on.
For a start it defines the size of the figure which is important for us from a scale point of view. It also defines the proportions and the position. You can define the size by comparing with a commercial figure. Use pliers to create sharp bends at the knees, hips and elbows – we don’t want rubbery looking arms & legs. I have used 3D printed boots here because I hate sculpting them. You can always use boots from a spare figure if you want to cheat this bit -as long as you don’t plan to sell it as your own original work (the same goes for heads and hands). I haven’t added arms to the armature because they are going to be separate for moulding. I usually leave them off anyway because they can get in the way of sculpting the torso.
Once these things are set it’s then vital to set it solid so it doesn’t move around mid-sculpt. I use a thin layer of Milliput, pressed into all the crevices of the wire, which goes rock hard. I am not yet sculpting any anatomy, this is just to fix the wire in position. It’s especially vital that it is fixed solid at the feet because this will be the point of most stress when you are modelling.
I will carve some of the Milliput away when it is set, so I don’t have any unwanted lumps and bumps interfering with the anatomy.
Now, about those 3D printed feet….
All this was done when I thought I would be using Milliput as normal, which I just leave to cure naturally. But Bees Putty is a polymer clay like Fimo or Sculpy and needs to be cooked in a domestic oven at 140 degrees. I was worried that the resin boots would melt, or smell bad, so rather than risk it I ended up sculpting the boots anyway. I may well revisit them, we’ll see.
thanks for looking
NeilComment
-
Oh, lovely!!
I do like a great SPS, especially when it's the dark arts being explained by a Wizard!
Excellent stuff Neil... I can't wait for this to develop mate,
AndyComment
-
Neil,
I am definitely in mate, before I caught up on the blog I was going to ask you to do a SBS. I would love to give this ago one day and your just the man to learn from.Comment
-
Great start with the armatures Neil. These little points is what's needed in an sbs which we take for granted when we start off. I notice many struggle to correct at a later stage but by that time it's too late.
Cheers,
RichardComment
-
Before we go any further we need to talk about tools.
They can be as basic or as sophisticated, as many or as few as your pocket or conscience allows. Bill Horan famously uses cocktail sticks, often shaped or whittled for one specific task. There are many tools you will already have such as a scalpel with various blades. Sewing needles are good and very cheap even if you don’t have a SWMBO who sews. I have a large selection fitted into pin vices as handles, but you can just push them into a piece of dowel, or fill the end of an old pen with Milliput and poke a needle into it. A set of bigger darning needles is very useful. I have a couple of specially designed teflon tools which I have hardly ever used, and some miniature screwdrivers that are good for flat shapes. There are some very nice stainless steel dental tools (expensive) and wax sculpting tools (cheaper but just as good). I do like these for working with Milliput because it is easy to clean the cured putty off without damaging the tool. For bigger stuff there are clay modelling tools in wood and plastic, and I even have a set of plastic cake-decorating tools which were very cheap on fleabay. I have only used one or two of the sensible shaped ones but still…
And there are the silicon rubber clay shapers, which were terribly expensive when I bought them years ago but have come down in price by now. They come in different sizes and grades of firmness, and I found them difficult to get on with when sculpting Milliput, but I am using them pretty much exclusively for the Bees Putty. Interestingly I would have expected to use mostly the small sizes, but I am actually preferring the larger sizes for most work, but we will come to that later.
As I have said before, I am very much a carver by nature, in that I usually just roughly model the Milliput, let it cure and then post-finish it with scalpel, file and wet & dry. Polymer clay requires you to be more of a modeller, getting it right from the outset, so I am out of my comfort zone with this aspect of sculpting. Especially with the surface finish, but again, we will come to that later. The advantage of polymer clay over epoxy putty like Milliput is that you have absolutely unlimited working time, you can even leave it for days and pick up where you left off, whereas with epoxy clay you only have a window of about an hour and half to two hours, and the putty is gradually getting firmer all the while. Now there are many advantages to this as well, as you can exploit the gradual firming up for different processes, but you can only work on a small area at a time. Then again that’s not necessarily a problem because it means you are less like to damage the model while working on another area. It’s very easy to squish something you’ve spent hours getting just right if you’re not careful.
And of course epoxy putty is rather nasty for the skin when you are mixing it- I always wash my hands immediately and scrub with a nail brush before I do any sculpting.
There are other epoxy putties than Milliput, such as Magicsculp, Apoxysculp, A&B putty, Duro (GreenStuff). There are some fast setting plumbers’ repair putties which I use sometimes at the armature stage, but they are bit too fast for careful work. They all work in the same way, being two components which get kneaded together in equal quantities which starts the curing process. Each have their own slightly f different properties and some people mix two different ones together for different effects.
Polymer clays such as Fimo, Sculpy and now Bees Putty don’t require mixing but they need to be baked in a domestic oven to cure them. We will find out how well they respond to sanding carving and filing…. And of course they are kinder to the skin.
Next up- anatomy
thanks for looking
NeilComment
-
Fascinating stuff so far Neil. Not something I’d ever try I think, but there might be useful things I can steal :tongue-out3:
I know I can’t draw or sculpt. I've tried both in the past with zero result, so I’ll stick with colouring in and leave this black art to the genuinely talented.Comment
-
Neil. I shall stand at the front and offer drinks and other refreshments to the gathering crowd of impressed onlookers. Should be most enlightening.Comment
-
The next stage is to add the anatomy which will be evident under the clothes. It is sometimes tempting to pile straight in to the interesting bits, especially when you have a clear reference like we have, but again it’s a foundation that needs to be right in order to avoid problems later on.
With a polymer clay like Bees Putty if you just add a big lump the size of the leg the whole inner surface won’t naturally stick to the Milliput and you will end up with the leg moving around the armature as you sculpt. The putty needs to be added in small pieces abut the size of a grain of a small pea, each one firmly attached to the armature.
It takes a while to do the whole figure like this but it’s worth the effort.
Bees Putty comes in four grades of firmness and I used the Dubble Firm for this stage, although I think the regular Firm would have been fine. What I like about it is that it is all exactly the same colour so that whichever grades you use for different elements your sculpt will look uniform. On the other hand it makes it tricky to remember which grade you have used if you don’t make notes….I’ve never been a note taker but I find I’m having to bolster my memory in my old age.
Once you have the figure covered you can start to represent the actual body.
I did this with a metal tool because I needed the pressure to push the putty right into the armature
Then we work over the body with the clay shaper- rolling and dabbing the tool, rather than dragging- getting it to look something like a naked human being. I originally used the firmer clay shapers, but I find I prefer the softer more flexible ones. And curiously (but logically if you think about it) the larger soft ones are more flexible than the small ones, so that they become more like fine, precise extensions of the finger.
Here you can see the boots I sculpted- they were cooked separately to avoid damaging them , but the jury’s still out on them.
I’ve taken more care with the lower legs because of the puttees, but it’s not important to be a Michelangelo at this stage unless you have bare arms or legs, just as long as "all the right lumps are in all the right places", to misquote a pop song. In fact it's good to keep him on the slim side because once we start adding his clothes the putty will be a lot thicker than fabric at scale and we don’t want him to look like a Michelin Man. This is why many figures at small scales like 28mm often look unnaturally chunky.
Next we will put some trousers on him
Thanks for looking
NeilComment
Comment