This is new...

Ok, so I often get asked what the hell do I do at Art School. The following is an example. For my character design and storyboarding for animation class we have to build a maquette of an original character we created. I had a lot of ideas going into this project but seeing how it would be the first time I have ever had to sculpt something I decided to try and keep it as simple as possible. the first step was to draw a turn around of the character which is you see below.



After drawing the turn around, it is time to start building things. The first step is to build a wire armature of your charcter that will be attached to a base. This is essentially the skeleton of your maquette and should probably be as accurate to your drawing as possible. Of course mine is way off, but I like to make things are for myself.




Now you see some sort of grey crap where the major masses of the body meet? That is my new favorite thing called "Pro-Poxy." It is used by plumbers to seal up pipes and stuff. It looks like a stick of dynamite, but it is soft. When you take it out of the package it looks like a reject ding dong, you know those choclate twinkies with cream filling? You take this stuff, smoosh it together and it starts to heat up and get really gummy. You stick it in places and in a matter of minutes it is as hard as steal. I shit you not, this stuff might be one of the coolest inventions out there. However, when you mix it, it smells like ass and I highly recommend where gloves when you use it. You could literally stick someone to a wall with this stuff, which I plan to try in the near future.

Moving on, once the maquette is up and standing, you try to wrap it with foil to help fill in the big masses of the body. This is because the clay that I am using (aka Sculpy) is really dense and heavy. If you apply it too thick it will be too heavy for the armature to support. It apparently helps baking it too...



Finally, once that is done you start slapping the sculpy on the armature. From what I hear, it is best to get the sculpy on there and just block in the masses of the character and then go back and make it pretty. This is going to take forever to make but if comes out good it will be pretty kick ass. I have two weeks to do this project and I am already 3 days behind schedule. Maybe once in my life I will be a total prodigy at something and not have to work my ass off...yeah right.



Later!