Hey,

Happy new year!

Here’s what we’ll be doing this week:

Now we’re cooking…on to the actual proper real life sculpting part of the project rather than just thinking about it.  Happy days!  So then, today I’ll be taking you through the process of creating the ‘armature’ or ‘skeleton’ of the project.  As you know, if you’re going with a straight copy of my project, then that’s fine, just do as I do, and if you’re going wth  a different one, then you’ll have to adapt this slightly (for instance, if your project has six arms, you’ll need to revise the exact process somewhat).  However pretty much anything you do will be using the same principles, just break it down into small steps like I will demonstrate here, and don’t accept anything you’re not happy with, because if the proportions are off here, then you’re stuffed later on (well not entirely, but it won’t help).

You have two options at the armature stage.  Make one or buy one.  I’m going to be making one, but it doesn’t hurt to consider buying a dollie.  I’ve personally only used them occasionally to try them out, but I haven’t enjoyed the experience terribly.  Here are some pictures of dollies to give you an idea of what they look like:

If you decide to go with one of these, then you can bend them into the right position, and if you’re stuck on a particular joint, then you can cut it with a scalpel, drill a hole in either side of the joint and put a piece of wire (paperclip or something) with a dot of superglue on either side.  Volia! one re-poseable joint.  Some people re-do each and every joint on a dollie this way when they use them.

Pro’s and Con’s (advantages and disadvantages) of dollies vs. armatures?  firstly, the dollie gives you the right proportions and scale, great!  secondly, it is quicker, also great!  On the flip side, they are more expensive, and aren’t as poseable, with many people I know having trouble getting dynamic poses from them.  For that reason I choose not to use them for standard humanoid bipeds.  The whole point of sculpting for me is that I have complete freedom to do anything I want, which a converter or painter doesn’t, I don’t want anything to get in the way of that.

On to the tutorial proper!  sorry for that little digression.  For this bit of the project I’ll be using a cork, wire, superglue, clippers, putty, lubricant, my large clay shaper and my metal sculpting tool.  If you’re using polymer clay, then I’d recommend you also get some silver foil handy.  Finally, for scale purposes, I’m gathering pictures of skeletons, and another mini or three to compare size with.  Mike (Mickc22 on CMON) has shared a great resource with us and I thought I’d link straight to it with this hyperlink.

I begin with the width of the hips.  It might seem like an odd place to begin, but it’s important to take each of these dimensions one at a time in order to nail your scaling.  I’ve picked this one to start with, as it’s a dimension that I can concentrate on its own without worrying about anything else.  So, I clip off a generous piece of wire, much longer than the legs will actually be, and bend an ‘n’ shape from it, with the top of the ‘n’ being the width of the pelvis at the point the hips join to it.  Below are a couple of images that you can use.  Some people even print them out at their scale (my computer know-how doesn’t stretch to this), and then overlay their armature.  I’m looking for my armature hip width to be approximately the height of the tip of the coccyx, and further foward if you were to look at the skeleton from the side.

With my ‘n’ shaped piece of wire, I’m going to sort out the legs next.  Again, this can be done without worrying too much about more than one thing at once.  I bend out the length of wire from hip to knee, keeping it straight because i’m going to be putting his legs in trousers and I’m not too worried about getting the anatomy exactly right at this stage.  I make a little kink in the wire at the knee point, even if I want the mini to be standing straight, because it’s easier to get the proportions if you can see the joint.  I suppose that some black permaenant marker would do the trick too if you felt so inclined.

Now, with both legs bent, I’ve got the hip width, and the hip to knee part done (I’m going to try to steer clear of using any more anatomical terms than I have to!).  Next, i need to get the length from knee to the sole of the shoe/foot sorted.  This bit I always without fail find hard, and my minis have a bad habit of having shins that are too thin.  I am determined not to make the same mistake here!  As such, trying to keep an eye on the scale of mr. skeleton above, and in comparison with other minis of the same scale, I stick the two ends of the wire into my waiting cork to the right depth.

This gets compared to another mini to make sure the scale matches, and then I’m set.  In order to keep everything secure, a generous dollop of superglue on the cork around the join with the wire is added.

Phew! well that’s 1/3 of the armature done.  Hurrah!  onwards to the torso.  I take another piece of wire, and bend its end around the hip crossbar:

Then I hold this upright and put a generous bead of superglue on it in order to hold it in position.  Some people solder these joins for strength, but to be honest, I can’t see the advantage to that, my armatures haven’t ever suffered from a lack of structural integrity.

Anyway, next I measure out the piece of wire from the hip cross bar, to where i imagine the middle of the finished sculpt’s brain to be, i.e. right in the middle of it’s head.

The wire then gets bent out into the shoulder.

The end of the shoulder gets bent down to form the arm, and the head and neck section is squashed up.  You should be looking for approximately the same width on the shoulder cross-sections as the hip cross section.  Look at real people around you and you’ll see what I mean.

and then like the leg, the elbow is marked off, and the wire is clipped at where I imagine the mini’s wrist will be.

Now we have an arm, a back bone, shoulder and head.  marvellous! he’s actually starting to look like an armature.  Above you can see that I’ve actually began to pose him a little bit, so I can get an idea of what he is going to look like.  You can do this now, or do so later, it’s up to you.  Remember the golden rule though, bones don’t bend.  They stay straight, so any changes you make, except to the spine should keep those nice straight lines.  Several other guidelines,  to make a mini look dynamic, make sure that the line of the shoulders and the line of the hips are different. Also, people try to keep their head upright wherever they can, so a mini is likely to still have a head that is vertical or near-vertical.  When you’ve had a bit of practice of making armatures by the way, you can get to this point in 10 minutes or less.  I would have done so if I hadnt been stopping to make notes on what I was doing and take photographs every 20 seconds.  This is kind of feeling like stop frame animation!  I’m beginning to wonder what I’ve got myself in for, this is going to take me hours, nay days to sculpt and write up.  aah well, I’m committed now!

Next, we need to put in the other shoulder and arm.  This is done with a third piece of wire.  This wire gets wrapped around the shoulder/neck area of the armature, and superglued in place.

My project is going to have this shoulder and arm raised, so I don’t mind the wire being slightly higher on this side, it’ll help to begin to show  this movement.  However if you are after something more level, then you can wrap it around the spine and then bend it up and out, or glue a straight piece along the length of the other side of the shoulder, and work from that, whichever floats your boat.  Maybe this is where the soldering thing would come in useful, but I dont see this as being a particular problem.  It gets bent in the same way as the other arm, keeping the proportions.  I’m doing this straight away into the pose the mini will take, because it’s quite a dynamic one, but you can make it standing upright first and then bend it there afterwards if you like, it’s up to you.

Finally, I am adding a weight to the base before i go any further, so that when putty is added, it doesn’t become top heavy.  To do this I simply stick a generic miniature base to the underside of the cork, and glue a small coin inside it to keep everything stable.  Not 100% necessary, but I thought I’d mention it as I find it a convenience.

well done! we’ve now have a completed armature (almost)!  The next thing that we need to work on is securing everything that needs to be secured.  For that we’re going to be using some putty.  Woo! finally we’re starting on the putty!  Grab your preferred choice of grown up play dough, and start mixing it together.  This is simply going to give some strength to the final thing, and will begin to bulk out the shoulders and hips.  These two parts of an armature really give a sculpt its character, so this is where we start first.

Everything I do with putty follows three basic steps in one way or another, so while you are at a stage where you can play around and have fun and just try things out, I’ll mention them.  This way you get into good habits right from the start.  Hopefully too, you’ll begin to see that sculpting isn’t some kind of arcane art, it’s just a bunch of simple steps to get the desired result:

1.get the right quantity of putty in a clean lump

2.  Put it in place and get the right shape

3. sculpt the detail

Each of these steps becomes easier with practice, so just keep plugging away, and it’ll become more straightfoward.  Remember when you couldn’t paint in a straight line?  That changed with practice right? well this isn’t any different.  Just keep trying until you get there.

How does this manifest for the bulk of the shoulders and hips? lets follow through those three stages again:

1.  Once your putty is mixed (in the case of epoxy putty) or kneaded until it is soft (polymer clay), take a fat sausage of the stuff, and roll it smooth of any obvious joins in your hands.  Ok, so this isn’t totally necessary, but it’s good to get into the habit of being neat right from the start.   I’m aiming for a lump about the width of the hips, and about as tall.

2.  Squash it against the wire until it protrudes a little around the other side of the wire.  Finger prints don’t matter at this stage, so feel free to use your hands for this.  If the putty is sticking to them, then you could try lubricating your hands or the putty to counter it.

3.  Taking the metal sculpting tool (because I need to get the putty to go where I want it to firmly and without the need for a totally clean and tidy finish), I then begin to tease it around the wire to join up with other parts of the putty sticking out the other side. When it’s cured, this will make the join between the hips and the spine rock solid.  As practice, I then pick up the large clay shaper and start to smooth the putty out into what roughly equates to a bottom shape, with hip bones sticking out either side.

I smooth the putty against the spine and the legs, being careful not to go too far outside the ‘n’ of the legs and hips (with a man this is important, or he will look feminine, with a woman, their hips protrude more along with the thigh, so that’s ok).  Finally, I lightly draw in the ‘crack’ of the bottom with the clay shaper, which should follow a line from the spine around the middle of the ‘n’ shape where the spine is attached.  This is easy to rub out with the shaper if it goes wrong, and when it is correct, I ‘draw’ it in more firmly with the blade bit of the metal sculpting tool.

Who would have thought that the first piece of anatomy you would sculpt would be the backside?   with any sculpting it is useful to have something to go by visually, so find a passing person willing to model their bum for your efforts and try to follow their shape.  Also, the internet has plenty of pictures on it (might want to look over your shoulder before typing in ‘man’s firm buttocks’ into google), so there is plenty to go by.  If i was really keen on helping you along at this point then I’d photograph myself as a model, but alas, I’m just not quite that committed!

so there we have the hips/butt. hopefully it is a little smaller than normal, this is so the area can have clothes sculpted over without getting too out of proportion.  The same goes for the shoulders, which are coming next.  Begin again with a similar short fat sausage of putty and squidge it over the wire.

Then tease it around the wire until it is engulfed:

and begin to use the tools to mark proportions on like you did with the bum.  My mini is going to be covered in clothes, so I’m just getting the putty on at this stage, but if I knew he or she would have a clear or partially clear shoulders, back or chest, I’d I tend to lightly mark where the spine would go on the back, along with the bottom edge of the shoulder blade.  I’m not creating the shapes at this point, just making faint marks where these parts will go.  Google is your friend, as with any anatomy, find yourself a bunch of good pictures to work from, not just one, and from different angles too (remember your mini is three dimensional, and the image is two dimensional).  On the front I tend to mark in the dip at the base of the neck, and two parallel lines either side of where the clavicles (collar bones) will sit.  The putty should taper to a point part way down the spine, which you can do by simply squeezing under the arms and pulling down either wiht your fingers if they are small enough, by alternately using the metal sculping tool either side of the torso, or by using a pair of lubricated needle nosed pliers or tweezers to create the effect.  This will give the armature strength without getting in the way when you sculpt the anatomy.  This is also true at the shoulders, don’t let them protrude too much past the putty, or the proportions won’t be clear.

All of a sudden, we have a totally completed armature.  Very well done when you get this far, many don’t!  The next installment will be based around fleshing out the armature – I’m a big believer in getting the anatomical proportions correct before adding clothes or the like.  Send me your questions, progress pictures, or post them to Platoon Britannica or Coolminiornot forums, and we can all take a look at them there.  Don’t forget that I’ll be assembling a bit of an FAQ on each week if necessary and posting it next thursday, so you may find some last minute help in there too.  Trust me, if you’re struggling with something, then someone else taking part is too, so it’s good to share

Happy sculpting!

James