Hey,

If you’re new to this, it’s not too late to get in on the action, but you’ve got some reading and some work to do to catch up – go on, this is only going to happen once, message me and pledge to do it, then go grab some putty!  You’ll find the last post here, the preparation posts here, here, and here, and our private CMON forum here.  If you’re wanting to know who’s in on the project, then you’ll need to see here, and finally, if you want to know where people are at so far, then click here.

So then, we have a great armature, with a rough version of the shoulders and hips/butt, correctly proportioned legs and arms, and somewhere to put a head:

Now it’s time to add some flesh to the bones.  You’ll have noticed that the waist is a little thin, he’s … well I guess ‘corset trained’ doesn’t even come close!  so, lets give him some bulk here.  Here’s the opportunity for a little revision of our three step plan that we followed when we added the shoulders and hips.  Firstly, add an appropriately shaped piece of putty, secondly, push it around the wire and then finally, smooth it into place and give it a rough shape with a clay shaper or your equivalent soft tool.  I find rolling the large tapered head up and down the body from the shoulders to the hips works to keep the consistency between the three parts.

We’re joining one piece of cured putty (well two actually, shoulders and hips) to another, so this is the first chance we’ve had to chat about making your joins seamless.  This is a particularly good time to do it because if it’s a join that will be covered by clothes or something later, then it doesn’t matter if you get it totally right.  How does that happen then? well you’ve put the putty down as normal, and there’s a seam right?  You need to do this with the softest putty possible (so well kneaded in the case of polymer clay, and very recently mixed in the case of epoxy putty), and with a hard tool.  Once the new putty has been pushed up to the old, you need to gently tease the new onto the old.  The more you do this the more you get just the right pressure.  With fully cured layers blended into uncured layers, its easy – use lots of pressure and smear the soft layer slightly over the hard one.  With multiple layers of uncured putty, you need to get just the right pressure on the tool.  too much, and you dent both pieces of putty and make the join even more obvious.  Too little and it doesn’t blend.  Also you need the right speed, too little and you push a lump of putty along and again, accentuate the divide.

Sorry, when I did this bit I hadn’t thought about the tutorial so much, and just got on and did it roughly without worrying about the result.  As such I can’t show you a final smooth blend, my bad.  However, have a look at my tweedledum sculpt to see what I mean.  This is basically loads of lumps put on as muscles and then joined together, so lots of seams to sort out. (You can see more of Tweedledum here)

See the fissures between his six pack?  well they won’t do, it looks like he’s not wearing any skin.  I’ve demonstrated this in pure magicsculpt so that you can see the difference.  Use some very soft putty, roll out a really thin sausage of it, manouver it over the seam (preferably once it’s cured), and aggressively smooth it on with something hard but smooth, like the ’spoon’ on the end of my metal sculpting tool.  If the putty ‘tears’, you can smooth it out with a clay shaper with the appropriate shaped head.

Good stuff.  Now I’ve joined the shoulders to the hips, I decide that I need some more putty down one side.  If you bend to one side, you form folds on the squashed side and flatter on the stretched side right? well thats what this will give me.  Thus, I smooth another piece in.

This stage is hard to teach to be honest, especially without being with you in person.  Just keep adding bits of putty until you’ve bulked out your armature.  I found the anatomy so difficult when I started sculpting that I signed up for a life sculpting class, and had some rather lovely, if not erm… attractive ladies take their clothes off for the sake of my sculpting.  It really helped, and with cold hard practice I got to a point when I can relatively quickly see where a little bit of putty needs adding here or there.

Once the torso is done, not cleanly, I grant you, but roughly enough that I can add clothes over the top and keep the correct anatomical proportions, it’s time to bulk out the arms and legs.  I do these from the torso to the ankle and wrist respectively in one piece.  First I add a sausage of putty against the wire and smooth it around.  I’ll primarily demonstrate with one of the legs, but the same principle applies to each limb.

Remember, if you’re having trouble getting your putty to adhere to the wire, coat the armature wire in superglue and baking powder, and you’ll have a nice rough surface for the putty to key to.

Then, once it’s joined up and the seams have been ironed out (if the limbwill be bare), then start to get the shape right.  Less is more, the less  you poke and prod, the cleaner the finished article will be.  Again, we’re looking to get a painfully thin body here so that when we bulk it out with clothes, muscle definition and so forth, they won’t become badly proportioned. With anything less than 52mm scale at this point you can pretty much poke and squeeze in the basic shape.  an oblong crossection for the upper arm, a wider flatter bit for the elbow in comparison to the upper arm, and then a pinch of the lower arm with your fingers in the same plane as the bicep/tricep, and you have roughly the right shape.  Anything from there is just minor adjustment.  It’s important to take note of the position of the elbow so that the proportions remain, don’t lose sight of that, particularly with a straight arm or leg, or your mini will look different later on.

For the legs, with all your reference material to hand (including a mirror and your own legs if that helps), look at the taper of the thigh, noting how it is totally different on men and women, pinch in at the sides of the knee, and use a tool to give a little indentation above, below and particularly behind the kneecap for reference later (keep those proportions!).  For the lower leg, allow some lateral bulk for the calf, pinch off the bit below the calf again, and keep the putty around the bit where the foot will be, so that you can build the foot/shoe/boot around it later.

The putty gets smoothed around the armature:

The back of the knee has been indented here:

The results of the other leg:

Once the initial shape has been puttied on, I go around the mini, a little haphazardly, adding the odd bit of bulk here and there.  Firstly on the inside of the thighs, and also to begin to mark out a guide to his chest and gut.  I’m after a person who has spent more time in the lab than the gym, so he’s not going to be musculed, more soft than that (like me – oh dear!).  Finally, I added a little around the pelvic girdle to give it definition.  I should also point out that I added a little initial bulk to the head.  This was really simple, it’ll serve as a blank onto which the head can be sculpted later.  To do this I rolled a piece of putty into a ball, put a dot of superglue on the end of the armature wire, and then carefully pushed the ball on. Make sure it’s the right size, ’scale creep’ can really hit home with the head, so aim for putting the brain on the end of the armature wire, we’ll add the skull and flesh a little later on.

Whatever you are sculpting, use source material of the nearest ‘thing’ to it.  i.e. if you’re sculpting some sort of lizard, then find pictures, see where their muscle definition lies, and rough that in.  I promise you’ll sculpt better with reference material to hand, this is a simple fact.

Here you can see the same proceedure has been applied to the arms:

This stage is the last chance to adjust your stance without having to saw off and re-pin limbs and joints, so don’t accept settling for anything less that what you’re happy with at this point.  Also, put your leg or arm in the position you want the mini to be in, and see how it twists, and which muscles protrude.  Again, if your body is totally unsuitable, then find a willing volunteer, or google pictures of people.

Also, if it’s not quite right when you’re done, it doesn’t matter too much,  because so much of this will be covered up when we’re done. Cool.

At this point we’re done for the week, we have a bulked out armature, learned to blend one part into another, had a look at muscle definition, and definately made plenty of progress since last week.  Well done!  Next week we’ll get the trousers sorted, I can’t wait!

Happy sculpting!

James