Polymer Clay Fan

I’ve come to realize that most of my personal sculpting projects will probably never get completed.  One example of this is a warrior angel sculpt that I started some time back.  I really like a lot of things about this sculpture and after closely looking at it again I felt that it would be a great addition to my new cigar ashtray.  The side benefit here is that I’m also able to shorten the amount of time that it will take me to complete this project.

The gallery below shows some progress pics of my angel.  I’m sculpting the wings from scratch since the original ones really didn’t work well with my vase.

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One of the risk of letting a project sit on a shelf for too long is that as your skills develop it potentially is less likely that you will complete the project.  I’m sure there are quite a few of you out there that completely disagree with me but in my office I have a large number of unfinished sculptures that will never be completed. In all honesty most of the art that I have created is unfinished which brings up another point. Sometimes it’s really a good idea to see yourself to the end of a piece before jumping around to something else (one of my personal goals I’m trying to work on).

A couple years back (or more) I wanted to create a sculpture of what I called a soul collector.  Basically a Grim Reaper type of creature that has a variety of lost souls swimming under his skin.  I’m attracted to the concept of this project for the most part because of the complexity involved in being able to pull off the sculpt.  Sculpting the individual souls under the skin is one thing but making the entire project work to where it doesn’t look like a convoluted mess  is a different beast to conquer.  I’ve been working on and off with this project for over two years now (more off than on) and now that I’m ready to finish it I’ve come to realization that I do not like the direction that I have taken with my original sculpture. To start the sculpture has some symmetry issues and I’m not all that in love with the overall design.  I can fix all the problems but basically I’ve reached a point where starting over will probably cost me less time than trying to fix this sculpture.  It’s not that the sculpture is bad and I have received positive feedback on it but I’ve basically reached a point where my skills and design taste have changed enough where starting over is the best option.

So, to avoid getting too wordy here I’ll show of a collection of picks of my original concept along with the project I’m current working on.  Keep in mind that the latest sculpt is still in the early stages so it has a long ways to go until the details are caught up with the original piece. The first three pictures are my original design and the last two represent the newer sculpt.

You can see more on this sculpture at www.goreartistry.com

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Hey Gang, with Halloween fast approaching did you know that there is a really cool and great way to really impress your friends and family with your talent?. Although this website centers more around sculpting with polymer clay and wax, there are a lot of other types of materials that you can easily sculpt. Metal and wood seem obvious answers here but how about pumpkins. Can you think of any better way to spice up your Halloween this year than sculpting a really cool looking pumpkin?

Now I don’t want to be misleading here, sculpting pumpkins in very different than sculpting in wax or polymer clay. It’s kind of like sculpting with wood, the process is 100 percent a subtractive. You have to carve away the flesh of the pumpkin and any mistakes made could force you to reshape or even change your design. I know it sounds challenging but with a little practice it really is not that bad and most important of all it is a ton of fun! Read the rest of this entry »

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Not a lot going on with this lesson but I thought I would give a look at the back from one more angle. The left side of the back is as far as I’m going to take it until I move forward with the right half of my back. I wouldn’t recommend sculpting a back this way because it can mess up the balance of the muscles in the piece. The best approach is the sculpt the entire form at once. The only reason why I broke it down into the shapes is because I wanted to show a contrast between the two halves. Read the rest of this entry »

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The top half of my back still needs some work but I want to move on to the lower back to try and pull all the shapes together. I’m going to need to start working on the right half of the back pretty soon to make sure that all the shapes are coming together correctly. Once I sculpt the right half I should get a good idea if any of the individual shapes need to be reworked.

For this step I’m sculpting the muscles and skin folds that make up the lower back. Again using a loop too I carve out the areas individual muscles. If I carve away too much I can always go back and add little bits of clay here and there but since the lower back already has too much clay I can carve away the shapes for the folds of skin (and muscles). Read the rest of this entry »

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Step three in this tutorial builds on the first two steps that we used to sculpt the back. I continue to build out the individual forms by adding and removing clay to mimic the shapes in my resource material.

For this sculpture I am sculpting the details on the left side of the back first and then will move to the right side. I’m only doing it this way because it is a little easier to create a tutorial using this method. If I was just sculpting this without trying to document the process I would sculpt both side of the back at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the last tutorial I briefly went over how I like to draw out a rough outline of the different muscles. I use this trick on quite a few places on the body and it really helps be understand and build out the individual shapes. For example, I like to draw out the individual muscles when I sculpt muscular arms and very lean abs. The back also has a lot going on so even though my outline is pretty rough it still helps me break down the back into the individual muscles (or shapes).

The first step is to separate my back into two halves. Now you can’t just simply carve a line down the center of the back, otherwise your sculpture will look like it has a canon going down the center of it. To make the back look more natural I will blend the two halves of the large back muscles (latissimus dorsi) into the area of where the spine is located. This task is easily accomplished by carving the center edges of the back until it gently slopes to the spine. I keep working both halves of the back until I get a look that I am happy with. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sculpting a back can be a little tricky and I’ve always found it to be a bit challenging as well. There are a lot of different muscles and bones that make up the back and more importantly the shapes they create come and go into all different directions. Now sculpting a back with more body fat on it would decrease the difficulty but I prefer designs of a leaner physique. However, the key with this sculpture is to not go too lean on the back because it will not flow well with the rest of the design.

I have already sculpted a rough shape of the back when I blocked out the torso. Now I need to tie the individual muscles together while trying to make it look natural. Using a sharp sculpting tool I like to draw out some of the individual shapes. Basically I’m trying to break out the scapula, traps and lower lats into different basic shapes. Once this stage has been completed I will build out the individual forms. Read the rest of this entry »

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OK, for this lesson I will briefly cover the steps for blending the small round scars. I like to first layout my design before blending the shapes into the rest of the sculpture. The reason why is because if my spacing is off or I don’t like the way the design is taking shape I can easily make changes. Otherwise I would have to scrape away clay, smooth out the belly and start over.

Once I have everything where I want I just take a flat edge sculpting tool and blend the edges of my small ball shaped scars. The key is to make sure you blend all of the edges. To accomplish this I like to look at the sculpture from all kinds of angles. It is amazing how a sculpture changes when you look at it from a different angles, everything may like fine from one end while when you look at it from the other end all kinds of mistakes or imperfections appear. The same point holds true when painting a sculpture but that is another tutorial in itself. Read the rest of this entry »

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I know I just recently put together a lesson on sculpting the scars but the pictures for that lesson were taken a couple of years ago so I thought I would reinforce that lesson and also show you another way to create the individual scars. The previous lesson for sculpting scars was Lesson 8 in this series and for those that missed it you can read it at the following link – Tribal scars

There is an old saying in the US that there is more than one way to skin a cat. For those of you that read this blog from another country the saying simply implies that there is more than one way that you can do things. The saying hold true for sculpting and one way is not necessarily better than another. It really just comes down to your personal preference. I’ve outlined the steps for this lesson below. Read the rest of this entry »

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