Because Digital art finds its roots and references in traditional media, I found it necessary to include sculpture and more specifically model making techniques in this tutorial section.
Thanks to Alan Dickinson, a friend of mine and a renowned sculptor, I made this tutorial that follows a personal creation and gives valuable information and methodology built upon his years of experience in this traditional and sensual media.
My first topic was inspired by an Hajime Sorayama illustration.The human body is not the easiest thing to embrace, However it is very engaging to work with. The main difficulties that I encountered were the size of the figurine. The scale, being quite small, gave me a challenging task to achieve detail while keeping a perfect smoothness.
All the different tools to smooth out. From wire wool to sand paper, sanding block etc... They will be used in a logical order. That is the thicker and bigger first to get rid of the asperities and main bumps and then progressively down to the finest wire wool to make the surface as slick as possible.
The body after a smoothing process. the brush and the oil will be used on the soft material to give a slick clay surface before cooking.
The thigh is starting to have cracks along the pleats. This is partly due to a repetitive cooking process that harden and dry the clay.
Here the thigh crack is even more visible. The cutter is useful when it comes to pleat parts like the arm / elbow region, the thigh / calf or the breasts and the torso.
Time to start the feet. A first job, once again by adding tiny balls of clay and spreading them or smoothing them along the shape. This is a very fragile part since the wire stops at the ankle.
The leg and the feet are coming nicely together.
Close up on the feet. One can see that they need some sanding and the shape is still quite rough when it comes to details.
The hands can be particular. For that figurine, the pose makes it very hard to stick the hands and the body with clay alone. The hands are built apart using the same technic as the body, small wire though. Then the use of Proxy Putty (the green bit which comes actually in blue and yellow special plasticine that you mix together to harden) in between the two parts will act as a cement filling the cracks.
tips: One could also use one hard clay model of a hand and create a mold with soft polymere clay. Then hardening the mold by cooking, will create an easy hand mold to create hands without the structure steps.
We can notice that the righ arm is now looking odd and will have to be broken to redo it properly.
The finger tips are extremely hard to keep intact at that stage and they are more likely to break but it is not important for the moment. They will be finalised later.
The left arm and hand are coming nicely. The neck will stay at that stage unless you do the whole figurine in clay.
For the lucky ones, the next step will use Wax, a far more flexible material, for the head and later a resine cast will form the final figurine.