Wotan's sculpt Thomas Cochrane bust 1/6

[Steve Jones]

How long do you have to wait for the skull to harden before you start adding on the layers John?. Is it susceptible to being damaged while you sculpt over it??

[wotan]

Hi Steve

magic Sculpt is an air dry epoxy putty. I usually leave it over night but it starts to harden after about 5 hours. Once hard it can be sanded, drilled and generally abused without any chance of damage.

John

[wotan]

Moving right along. We have now reached the zombie Cochrane stage. Underlayer number 1 has been applied to the torso. I have very roughly modelled some anatomy, this is entirely unnecessary however I like to do it since it helps me to make sure the next layers of clothing will go on about right. It's like building the interior of a tank that no-one is ever going to see but I know its there.



I have also added a rough nose shape to build some flesh upon a little later and I have added the armatures for his arms. These are not cut to length yet nor properly positioned, but I like to get them added so that I can check the shoulder sculpting and overall size. If anyone is building figures this little shoulder joint detail may be useful. I insert a piece of square evergreen plastic into the shoulder itself then glue a corresponding piece of square plastic onto the ends of the arm armature. This way I can take the arms off whenever I want but they will always go back in the same position.



I will try to keep the arms separate so that painting will be a little easier.

John

[SimonT]

Excellent John - good to see your sculpting again

[Guest]

He looks very scary indeed!

[Peter Gillson]

My chair is pulled up. Looking good so far

Peter

[Jim R]

Hi John
Fascinating to see the way you go about sculpting.
Jim

[rtfoe]

Hi John, just like Jim I enjoy your figure build up from scratch. You make it look so easy.

Cheers,
Richard

[wotan]

Welcome everyone. I hope I won't disappoint.

I have now fleshed out his head. I used Fimo for this because it is a heat hardening clay so I can work on it as long as I want without it going hard. Then it can be put in the oven to bake it hard. It can also be heated several times so I built the main features first, fired that then added his ears and fired again. Still needs some sanding and cleaning but he's on the way. I decided to mount his head on his shoulders since this would make it easier to add his hair etc a little later. He has obviously been working out but he really needs to work on his arms a little more.



John

[Neil Merryweather]

John, that's looking excellent.
I am intrigued with your use of Fimo....
I have struggled with curing time of Milliput in the few portraits I have done- this makes perfect sense- I never thought to combine the two. I would worry the Fimo would shrink over the Milliput base and crack- but clearly it doesn't.
Then again I am a better carver than I am a modeller, so I always end up tweaking and scraping and sanding, and Fimo is not so good for that. But I will definitely give it a try next time.
In the olden days you had to mix original Fimo with translucent to get a better consistency, but there are several new types around now-which do you use?
cheers
Neil

[wotan]

Hi Neil

Thanks for looking in. I use just a regular sort of flesh coloured Fimo. I have never had shrinkage problems and since you can mess around sculpting it for as long as you want i have never needed to do major carving. It does sand very nicely.

Cochrane has now been to the hairdressers. I made this with a mix of Magic Sculpt and Greenstuff. This mixture gives a more firm medium to work in but it retains all the air drying qualities so is very useful for crisper sculpts. His collarS were very complicated but have been finished with the same sculpting mix.



John

[Guest]

Great sculpting :smiling3:.

[scottie3158]

John,
Wonderful work, I really wish I had the skill to do this.

[Neil Merryweather]

very nice indeed John :thumb2:

[rtfoe]

Superb John. Hair flow very nice. The collar is so paper thin.

Cheers,
Richard