@aristotle
@aristotle
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@aristotle
I don't have any advice on this, but I wanted to just chime in and say I like the piece. It reminds me of some of the tutorial work by Amelia Rowcroft. I haven't taken any of her courses, but they seem to be very good.
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Dan Schofield
Hello all Here is ‘Jesse 233’, my second sculpture and my entry for the Proko Cheap Sculpture Challenge. Although I suspect I fell at the ‘cheap’ hurdle, as I bought 2lbs of Chavant Medium for £17.49 (or $24.30 equivalent). Other than that, I already had (from my first sculpture) some aluminum wire, flower wire, pliers, Milliput original, and a wooden block, for making the armature. For reference the set of six miniature pliers was £13.99. For tools, again, I already had a homemade rake (a pedicure baton with a 24-gauge nickel wound guitar string offcut attached), and I supplemented this with a crappy plastic handle, metal end dental tool (although I do have some dental tools bought specifically for sculpture, in the spirit of the challenge, this was just lying around at home.) All in then, the ‘from scratch cost’ is probably around $50. I made the armature using the simple mannikin frame drawings on page 40 of Loomis’ Figure Drawing book if you know it, which gave me an 11cm skeleton, slightly larger than the 75mm I sculpted at before. I made many, many errors (procedural and structural) in my first sculpture (you can see it on my Instagram @fairygrot). Since then I have learnt more about sculpture and I wanted to focus on two of these fundamental learnings, also referenced by Andrew so far on this course. 1. Getting the pelvis and rib cage right. 2. Focusing on contours (as opposed to internal information). Having the rotational pose photos was incredible. I really tried not to get sucked into internal anatomical detail I knew was there but couldn’t see on the contour. I only started adding some internal volume in the last couple of sculpting sessions. I also didn’t get bogged down in refining. I tried. But then I discovered that my tools just dragged the clay where I didn’t want it (very different to the polymer clay I used for my first sculpture). So early on I dropped the tools, and gave myself a goal of only using my fingers (the face of my pinky finger nail ended up making a much better shaping and smoothing tool than the dental tool). I therefore only used my home-made tool in the last session for trying out some raking across the chest, abdomen and thighs. Everything else is with fingers. This was done over five or six sessions, including one for making the armature, of between one and three hours. Ten to fifteen hours all in I think. My girlfriend ‘suggested’ I stop at this stage (i.e. she banned me from continuing), which I think is the right decision. I wanted to do something more gestural and loose and, despite this taking 5x longer than it probably should, I am happy with the outcome. Sorry for the waffle but, given the audience, I hope you found it interesting. Good luck with the challenge, all! Dan
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@aristotle
Congrats on the win--well deserved!!
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@aristotle
This is very cool! I haven't used Chavant in the past, largely put off by the price. Did you like working with it?
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@aristotle
Very nice! I haven't tried digital sculpting yet. Do you find that the skills you gain in digital transfer to traditional, and the reverse?
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@brandonstudio
Well, I had a go at the challenge, it was fun. I think i might take this one further and push the details as I love the pose!
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@aristotle
Very nice! If you do decide to take this further, as you mentioned, you should be sure to upload those photos too.
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@aristotle
I want to practice sculpting heads, and I was hoping to find some good references of the same person from multiple angles. Do any of you have recommendations? Posespace seems to work okay, but seems geared more toward figurative work. I just wondered if there were some options that I was missing. In the past I have tried to use celebrities, since it is easy to find lots of photos of them, but something with all the photos gathered together, with photos from all angles would be great. Any thoughts? It seems to me that there could be room for a crowd-sourced collection of free artist reference here (especially if we are just looking at portraits, since people would be more willing to put up their face online than nudes), but I don't know of anything like this. If 20 sculptors took photos of three friends each, we would have a nice start to a collection.
Wayne Lam
Funny my 20 years old wire stand I made but never get to finish, so using an old stand, foil and a 2 inches wooden shim from picture framing. Here is the head and upper body study.
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@aristotle
Nice work. The shim is an interesting tool. It look like it helps keep you focused on main forms--a bit like a rough rake, maybe. I have a bad habit of trying to get a smooth finish too early, before the forms are worked out.
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@kobile
Hi, was able to "finish" it on time, thank you very much Andrew! Crits are welcome :) kobi
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@aristotle
Very nice! I like the way it seems to just emerge from the block of clay.
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David Marteney
Here’s my submission. I’ve never really done any kind of sculpture before, but I really enjoyed the process. Only tools I used were my fingers and some bent wire, which you can see in the pictures.
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@aristotle
Very dynamic. Great work!
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@samy_art21
My entry for the cheap sculpture challenge: First time doing a sculpture with a block of air dry clay! It was pretty difficult! Used a spare brush, palette knife and paperclips, totalling less than 5$!
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@aristotle
Nice work, and bonus points for getting an awesome shadow from it on the wall behind.
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@aristotle
Here is a face that I based, especially in the early stages, on Jesse. I began with the profile, and I tried to really get Jesse's basic profile. After I had that, I tried to work without the photo reference as much, exploring the shape of the face and the features in ways that I thought was interesting. I probably would have learned more by being more faithful to the references the whole time, but I enjoyed working in something of a hybrid way. Is this a bad way to use reference materials, in this sort of hybrid way? I didn't used an armature for this--it is solid clay. I used a cheap clay that comes in multi-colored bars, which I kneaded together. The clay was a little over $2 a pound, but I used less than half of that. (I gave some thoughts on the clay in another post in this thread for a torso I did, so I won't repeat that here.) For tools, I used a paperclip, which I mangled a little bit so that I had loops of slightly different sizes and shapes. I also used a tooth pick. I broke it in half by accident, half way through sculpting, but then realized that the broken off end has its uses as well.
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@aristotle
I hadn't really thought of that, but I think you are right. Cavill's head has a kind of blockiness, which I think I naturally tend to produce when I move away from my references.
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@aristotle
Here is an ear I did from Jesse. I really enjoy sculpting ears. They have a sort of cool, abstract quality. I used Van Aken Plastalina clay. I really expected to like this. Both the color and the branding style made me think that this was a much better clay than the multicolor clay sticks I used for other sculptures this month. I didn't like it much, though. It was too sticky; it was just hard to work with. After I got the basic shape of the ear, I put the sculpture in the fridge to harden it up a bit. This worked, and it got rid of the stickiness--it was fine for a little detail work, but I still wasn't a huge fan. Overall, I was disappointed with this clay, but maybe I just need to learn to use it better. The Plastalina was on sale, and the whole bar cost me a little over $2. I probably used less than a dollar's worth, though. The only tool I used, besides my hands, was this paperclip. I sculpted it on a wood flooring sample that I had laying around the garage, and which I got for free from a flooring store.
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@aristotle
So here is my first of three sculptures I did for this challenge, and I figured I would upload all of them, since you said multiple submissions were okay. In any case, this was my first torso sculpture I have done, although I have been practicing sculpting the human head. I found the torso a lot of fun to make. I have only done the front. (Let's pretend it is a very high relief piece that still needs to be attached to a background!) I wanted to really dig into the minimal tools on this one, so I didn't use any at all. Just my fingers. I actually quite like the texture I got by using the back of my fingernail to do the final finishing on it. I began my armature by making a kidney shape out of crumpled newspaper, and then covered this with aluminum foil. For the clay, I used some very cheap and colorful modeling clay that was clearly intended for children. I never would have picked this up, but it seemed similar to what I saw Andrew talking about from the Dollar Store. Although I didn't get mine at a dollar store (I checked; they didn't carry any), it was very cheap. It was on sale for about $2.15 a pound. I liked this clay quite a bit, although there were two things I don't like about it. First, it takes a lot of time to knead all the colors together. Although I like the final color, I don't like taking 30 minutes to knead it together. I wondered if I could melt it together, but I was afraid this might make my house smell. Second, the clay sometimes tears when I push it around--it doesn't have the plasticity that I would like. Overall, though, I was impressed with the clay and would use it again. I used about a pound and a half on the torso.
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Paige Krämer
Day 3 - Proko’s 5$ #cheapsculpturechallenge  - FINAL submission - This was super fun, motivating and it gave me an objective. Tried my best to only have my outline silhouette viewing mode turned on. Have FUN everyone :)
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@aristotle
Really nice work! I liked following the progress.
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Paige Krämer
Day 2 of How to sculpt on a budget. Not sure how far I want to push this one. FEED BACK is always welcome. ( I am here to learn ;) Note: Dollar store clay is very sticky..so it holds onto popsicle sticks a little to much. It’s soooo soft and mushy which reminds me of super sculpy when it is warm.
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@aristotle
Awesome work! As for the stickiness, I am having a similar problem with some of the cheaper clay I picked up. I have been sticking the sculpture in the fridge for a few minutes which both firms it up and makes it much less sticky.
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@aristotle
I think these look fantastic! Keep up the good work!
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@aristotle
Is this limited to one entry per person, or if I do multiples based on these photos, can I enter them all?
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@aristotle
Awesome work. Do you prefer Castilene or Cx5 better?
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@kaguru
If you could at least uploaded the side view...so I could see it better
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@aristotle
Here it is.
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Richard Husky
Should be pretty proud of yourself....looks like you have the fundamentals down very well.
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@aristotle
Thanks!
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Wayne Lam
I would start off doing a skulls well, it is always a struggle when you don’t see the land mark. Nice sculpture, I would remove the hard lines on the face as there are no hard lines on the nose and the jaw looks blocky if that is intentional. Far as I see even people have strong jaw chin still have taper off softly.
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@aristotle
Thanks!
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