Polymer Clay Fan

Working on the left arm

I think the theme for my latest tutorials is going to be about fixing mistakes.  I did not do a very good job with the armature at the beginning of this sculpture and I am now paying for it.  Basically the clay is too heavy for the shoulder and arm to support all of the weight.  I’m now having issues where the shoulder is splitting in half because of the weight of the arm and the fiddle.

Right now the only way that I see to resolve this issue is to bake the shoulder and arm as one piece and attach it to the Fiddler’s torso at a later time.  Most likely I’ll still have a weight issue at the point I attach the arm at so my workaround for that will be to partially bake the entire area where the shoulder attaches to (I’ll cover that in more detail later on)

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Fixing the forearm

Well, I’m definitely not perfect and I am also not afraid to show my mistakes. I do learn a lot from my mistakes and I think posting them on this site also helps others learn as well. If you have been following the tutorials on this site for awhile then you may remember me mentioning that you need to be careful when bulking out a sculpture to aluminum foil. Well, now you are about to get a good example on why I said that.

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Sculpting the Fiddler’s ears

I’ve been using these rough placeholders as ears for awhile now and it has gotten to the point where they are starting to bug me.  Ears take some patience to sculpt also so I have been putting them off for awhile.

Since I am sculpting the devil in this piece I decided to give him pointed ears shaped like an elf’s.  Just another tweak to add to the overall look of the piece.

* This sculpture is created with Super Sculpey.

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Spicing up the neck

I’m a very dynamic sculptor (I’ve said this before and I am sure I’ll say it again). With my own original art I usually have a basic idea of the sculpture I want to create but once I get started I just kind of make things up as I move along. Personally I view this as a strength and not a weakness because the final design usually ends up better than the original vision.

That being said the new design to the horns has given me an idea on how I can spice up the rest of the sculpture a bit. I’ll start with changes to the neck in this tutorial and will move on from there in the later lessons.

* This sculpture is created with Super Sculpey.

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I think the pictures in this tutorial explain everything pretty well so just follow the images from left to right. Since my arms will be dangling at the side this method works pretty well.

If you plan to pose the arm or add additional weight to it by placing something in the hand then you would want to build an armature that supports the arm better then what I have shown below.

* This sculpture is created with Super Sculpey.

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I’ve made enough progress on the face at this stage where I can move on to the torso.  Initially when I started this sculpture I only had plans to build a bust (sculpture from the waist up).  However, after working on it for some time I decided to do a full figure instead.  The reason why I am pointing this out is because I did not build an armature for this sculpture that would support an entire figure.  So for the next couple of lessons I will be sculpting this piece as if it were going to end up as a bust and then will switch to doing a full figure sculpture.

Ideally you will want to build out the armature for the full figure from the beginning since it will produce a better and more stable armature.  However, if you feel you need to take the design in a new direction there is no reason why you can’t.  The armature that I will use in the future post is not ideal for a full figure but it will work for this piece and will allow me to make the changes in the direction of my vision.

* This sculpture is created with Super Sculpey.

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