To Sculpt a Clown

I've forgotten how much I enjoy the process of sculpting a character. It can be so rewarding when everything happens just as you envisioned it. I have only just baked the head of Jangles the Clown which I have been working on over the past couple of days.

In the more recent past I find that I've rushed through characters in the hope of creating something great, quickly. The results of doing this are always personally disappointing (Wormwood in particular).

Starting with a bare armature I bulked out the characters basic form with some clay, being careful to maintain symmetry at an early stage (which means being careful with the quantity of clay, being sure that it is added in even quantities around the character). It's a slow process and the firm clay doesn't make it any easier. It took me from roughly 12am to 4pm with a few breaks (and lots of movies, James and the Giant Peach & The Witches in particular, why Roald Dahl? I have no idea) and I managed to get to this point:

It might not look impressive, but at this stage most of the laborious work takes place at this point. Moving around relatively large quantities of clay and trying maintain some symmetry isn't exactly difficult, but it is time consuming and requires a pair of enduring hands.

The next day I managed to bulk out the legs and add some shoes, which took another 2 hours.

It's at this point I realised how out of sync the perspective and foreshortening in my sketch was when compared to the sculpt. When faced with this it's better to ignore the conflict and just accept that you've made a mistake in the sketch.

Then the face, this is always my favourite part and I should really have left it until last for desert, but I think I needed to enjoy myself after two days of boring work.

At the end of the third day, at around 10:30 at night I ended up with this:

I knew it was a good start, but wrote a list of required changes like: "change ears, smooth out lips," and left it for the next day in which I finished and baked the head:

[Note]: It doesn't look anywhere near as dusty in real life, that's odd.

Dr. Jangles' Armature

Another quick update on my progress.

I made the basic armature for the Dr. Jangles sculpt today. After going over the old armature map, I decided that a 6 piece armature was probably a bit too fragile and fiddly, so I reworked it and managed to design a much stronger 3 piece armature.

I measured out the rough lengths of each of the parts, rolled and straightened roughly 95cm of heavy gauge armature wire, marked out the measurements and bending points, and then cut them all to size.

Armature wire, being made of aluminum, is incredibly hard to solder so I usually wrap thin copper wire around the various parts of the armature that need to be bound together (in this case the spinal area).

The copper does a surprisingly good job of holding everything together, but to be safe I added a few blobs of super glue to the spinal area and waited for it to dry, then wiped off any excess glue.

When measuring I made sure to leave a bit of extra wire in the feet so that I could bend down the ends to insert into a base.

After drilling a couple of suitable holes into my 'work bench' (just a plank of MDF) I inserted the armature into the holes and made some fine posture adjustments with my hands. It's sturdy and - as far as I can tell - to the correct scale.

I'm not sure if I should give him a more dynamic pose, because I feel that it might compromise the dimensions of the sculpt and I want it to communicate his basic dimensions and shape at a glance.

This was all done in roughly an hour.

More updates to come. Progress shots below, I think I'll take more of future characters so you can see more of my process, but it's hard to stop working when you're 'in the zone'.

[Above]: The edited armature map with measurements.

[Above]: The workbench with armature.

[Above]: The armature itself.

 

My Workspace

Just a quick post.

I thought it would be a good idea to document how my work space looks at the moment. I haven't started sculpting yet, but I've bought everything that I need and it's all set out neatly. I think I'm trying to make it as enticing as possible, but the fact that I'm still undecided on which characters I should do is causing me to procrastinate :S

I've also bought a 'creative top hat' that I'm wearing whenever I do some work, I think it's a great way of placing my mind firmly within the boundaries of "I'm wearing my work hat, therefore I must work".

It sounds like something a kindergarten teacher might use on unruly children, but so far it's working, which really makes me question my mental maturity.

Back Again

I haven't posted about anything in quite awhile and I feel that it's required of me to document what's happening both in my head and on my workbench. To be honest, not much has been happening on my work bench and I feel inclined to blame it on the fact that I've been hard pressed with written projects, but perhaps that would be just a convenient excuse.

In truth it has been a bit difficult with the pressure of a project hanging over my head and has caused me to procrastinate quite a bit more than usual, getting started is always the hardest part.

I've managed to create five ideas for potential project worthy characters and organised all of their development in neat folders (a have a habit of becoming meticulously organised whenever things get scary or a deadline is looming). The first of which is a squat pirate captain with certain swordfish like traits. The second is a fragile female mystic with a cacoon-esque turban. A grotesquely fat (and quite abstract) clown monster. A small orphaned puppet boy who is somewhat of a combination of Oliver, Pip Pirrup, and Pinocchio. And finally a strange quadrupedal clown who for whatever reason seems to have earned himself a doctorate as he is inexplicably named "Dr. Jangles".

I hope to make sculptures of all five of the characters, but I feel that this is impractical given my time constrains. When trying to get some consensus on which three characters I should definitely make I received some interesting if not varied feedback.

One of my fellow students said that "Dr. Jangles" and The Orphan seemed to be the most developed, with the Captain, Mystic, and Monster all being far too abstract or more "ideas of what they are" rather than being a fully realised character. My supervisor on the other hand seemed to revel in the conceptual nature of particularly the mystic.

Personally I imagine that "Dr. Jangles" would be the most fun to sculpt and I'm quite keen to do him justice. The Monster is quite interesting conceptually, but I imagine she would be quite difficult to get right. At this time I'm inclined to choose, "Dr. Jangles", The Captain, and The Mystic, as they each have quite interesting shapes that I believe will push me into strange challenges that I've never really experienced before.

Also, just briefly, my supervisor made a great point of asking me to think about how each character would move and act. This was something that had been resting in the back of my head, but had never properly addressed. So I am now in the process of drawing rough walk cycles, playing loosely with plasticine and using whatever I can get my hands on to simulate the correct feeling for each character's movement (at one particularly creative stage I filled an old plastic bag with rags and mandarines and shuffled in across the kitchen bench, the results of which I might post here).

That's all for now, I'll post some of the developmental work for each character here when I figure out how to do so.

[Above]: Dr. Jangles final design sketch.

[Above]: Ms. Magwitch sketches, the first was done almost a year ago when I woke up in the middle of the night.

[Above]: Rough colour concepts for Ms. Magwitch, done with just a mouse because my tablet was faulty.

[Above]: The Captain turnaround.

[Above]: The Captain with some possible colour combinations, I'm starting to think of him as having an abnormal skin tone like green or blue.

[Above]: Ms. Magwitch taking her first terrifying steps.

[Above]: An early conceptual sketch of The Mystic

[Above]: Thinking of how the Mystic would move about, a bit of a laboured slug-like shuffle.

[Above]: Early sketches of the Orphan; Goghrey Vandewilde. He came from a noble family, hence the ponsy name.

 

[Above]: Goghrey's Orphan Regalia

[Above]: Costume choices.

[Above]: Thinking about movement.