Work in Progress Roundup

This week was slow in terms of progress, but I had a day off for sculpting and the needed preparations. I sculpted the black bats face, which looks a little sadder than Hugos. It will probably look completely different once it is painted, which is what I like a lot about adding color. You can completely change the mood.

I am currently trying something a bit different from my full scale dolls, small mostly sculpted trophies with fabric ears. This little one will be an albino rabbit, in time for easter.

The last project has to wait until I have some time, because I really want it to turn out right. You can guess what it will be from the armature...

White Unicorn

Like I promised, here is the process of the white unicorn in pictures. It was, like I mentioned many times before, just an experiment, even though I would not call the finished head an experiment. But I did not know how I wanted the finished thing to look like, which is why I changed some things pretty late (like the hair).

I started with an aluminium foil, wire and sticky tape armature. It looked good at first but it was not stiff enough, so when I added the clay I kind of ruined the armature because the Magic Sculpt hardened while I used it (Magic Sculpt is a two part epoxy clay, it hardens through mixing resin with hardener) and I had to use force to get a smooth surface.

First pic shows the rough surface, on the second one I smoothed it down a bit (mostly with my finger nails and water) and decided for a place for the eyes.

Added more clay to the upper side of the head (I had to sculpt the head in two parts, since it had to dry on one side first). This part was pretty much finished, until I decided to try to get some fur texture in it, since I worked with that on two of my three dolls and it would be important to know if the clay was still soft enough for that.

I added the the texture with a pottery needle. Some parts were still pretty soft, others were hardening pretty fast, which made the whole process a pain in the butt. It all worked out in the end, but it stressed me out because working on the texture was a timed event. I should not have been any slower.

The horn and ears were very useful for working on the lower side of the head. I was adding the fur texture starting at the seams to the upper side so they were not visible in the end.

This is the finished head. At first I thought this was it, but for some reason (I really can't remember the reason) I decided it needed some hair.

It took some time to find the right kind of hair, I tried different things, but in the end I used some silvery gray plastic extensions. The picture above shows a bit of the hair. It was not that easy to add the hair because Magic Sculpt is hard as a rock when it has completely hardened (which takes about 6 hours). In the end I just added the extensions which left a bit of a bump, but it is not very obvious. I used white gesso as a base coat for the acrylics I usually use to paint the faces.

Painting at night has its disadvantages, one of them is that colors sometimes turn out all wrong. The first paint job of the fleshy parts turned out very yellow-y, so I added some pink. And I gilded the horn at the tip because I love to use that gilding wax.

And this is how the head looks in the end. I am very happy with it. And the long hair and blue glass eyes gives it a magical look.

There is still the process post of the black unicorn incoming, which won't be that exciting because it was pretty much the same process. Only that I added the hair straight at the beginning. But more on that  in the post itself.

the frustration of not knowing your materials

I am usually a very spontaneous person when it comes to my art projects. I have an idea and I need to create it... right now. The only thing that is allowed to come between me and my art progress is a trip to an art supplies store to get everything I need. Yes, reading up on materials and techniques would probably be an immense help, but it always seems like such a waste of time to me. And finding things out on my own and experimenting can be very rewarding. Sometimes my way of doing it works, which is awesome. And sometimes it does not work.

One of these examples is the Raffi custom I am currently working on. I saw it and I had this instant idea... it had to have some antlers, big ones. Just.. because. I had already worked with wire armatures before, but the one for the Raffi turned out very wobbly. It might be because I only had some golden jewelry wire but what did it matter, it would have to work!

This is a picture of the very beginning. You can see the golden wire and the antlers in the back of the pic. And yes, I cut myself and used a Hello Kitty bandaid. I regret nothing!

I still had some super light air dry clay at home, so I decided that, when the antlers had to be that big, they should be light, because else they would probably bend down to the floor, which would look stupid. It took a lot of fumbling with the clay and the wire, both did not seem to like the idea to start a relationship for my little deer project. When I was done, it looked like this.

It was not that bad. They looked nice, but even after drying it was still bendy and wobbly, which was not what I wanted. I let it dry completely and decided to add another layer of light air drying clay. The antlers ended up a bit thicker, but still nice. Nice to look at at least.

But then, today, I moved it from the table, very carefully, to another place because I needed to clean a bit and one of the antlers broke. It did not fall off because of the wire underneath the clay, but I could not keep it like that. While staring at it in despair and thinking of some easy way out, I saw another crack on the other side.

 I decided to follow the fastest and probably easiest solution at that point, use some Magic Sculpt. I don't have that much experience with it yet, but I initially did not want to use it for the antlers because it is really heavy. I used it for the head and the whole thing is in danger of falling over if it was not for the tail of the same material that kept it kind of balanced. 

The antlers got another layer of clay and look really thick now. It is currently drying, but I have no experience at this, and I have no idea if it is the remedy for my breaking antlers.

So.. what does this whole experiment tell me? I should start planning things out a bit. If I had used the right thing from the beginning, this would not have happened. The right wire, the right clay... On the other hand, these failures help me realizing just that. That there are things I should not use in this or that way. But it probably cost me more time finding it out this way than it would have if I was just looking for advise on the internet.

I can't wait for the clay to dry. There is not much more I can do now but wait...