Before I begin, I will mention that the following is entirely my own work. I used other artist's tutorials as guides and basic how-to instructions only, making my own interpretations and changes as I saw fit. All of the following instructions, pictures, and teachings are owned solely by me, and may not be used without permission from me. Copyright laws will be enforced.
Now on to the sculpt! This first sculpt is a dragon, emerald green, now being made for a contest on the OOAK Guild forums.
This is actually not my first dragon. The first dragon I ever made was solid clay, almost 4 inches thick at the body, and was severely under baked with no internal structure. Within a week of finishing him, his scales and delicate parts started to break off at the slightest touch. I had 25 freestanding scales running down his spine, and they all snapped off. His wings broke, and finally the neck snapped under the weight of the head. He was cool though, I'll post what few pictures I have of him in a later post. While I was quite upset that I 'lost' him, his legacy to me was my initial quest on how to keep it from happening again, and in my search for 'clay skeleton', I found Katherine Dewey's website. I ended up ordering several of her instructional pamphlets, and gained a world of insight on how to keep it from ever happening again.
When I started this guy, it was just to get back into the clay after almost a year of not touching it at all. But he started to have his own personality from the very beginning, and argued with me every step of the way ;).
I took lots of pictures from the start, and as I went along. So even though I never intended to do a tutorial, it kind of ended up that way. So onwards we go.
This guy was built right from the start. My first armature for a non human being. I didn't think about taking pictures until after I finished the armature completely, but I will try to explain what I did the best I can.
His spine is 2 pieces of 20 gauge wire twisted heavily together. Not so easy to do by hand, but with a good set of needle nose pliers with a set of flat headed pliers to hold it makes things somewhat more manageable. His head is another set of 20g wire twisted but its a single piece wrapped around the main wire and angled downward to make the lower jaw. I then twisted the bottom jaw wire into a small loop and re-attached it to the main wire once more. This bulk of wrapped wire makes a great "base of skull" to wrap foil around later. Angle the top wire for the top jaw a bit, and that's the head.
The foil bulk out was just a few balls of crumpled foil that looked to be about the right size, stuck against the wire spine to hold them in place, and wrapped with a sheet of foil to keep everything in place. There are tons of other tutorials on how to foil bulk out wire, so I won't go into much detail here. Its fairly simple to do.
You can see on the head there is what looks to be masking tape ... its actually freezer paper tape. In the picture its only on the head, but after this was taken I covered the entire body with it. Which suspiciously looks, feels, and has the same tackiness as standard masking tape. For twice the cost. Its also very slick on its non-sticky side, and as I found out later, clay won't stick to it very well. So I took some TLS, (translucent liquid sculpey) and added a light layer as per several other artists advice on how to attach clay to tape. Then while allowing that to set a bit I started mixing my clay.
( I should also mention that in the pictures the tape is only on the head, but after it was taken I covered the entire body with it. )
My clay of choice is Super Sculpey. I find it easiest so far to work with, although I will admit I have not used Pro-Sculpt or Cernit yet. I have tried Fimo and I like it for smaller projects, but not larger sculpts yet.
So I used one full layer of SS and mixed it with one eighth of the green sculpey. The colored clay is the standard color Sculpey III. This green is emerald, I believe.
Now this was the first rough head shape. I was trying to go for a more alligator like head and mouth, and it just wasn't happening. The first 'argument' of many to come, actually. But I preserved on, and started adding details.
A bottom jaw.
Nostrils and more definition in the bridge of the nose.
At this point I wasn't *totally* happy with the jaw, it kept moving and sliding off the wire loop way too much. I attached it with small balls of clay at each corner of the mouth, but that wasn't enough to keep it in place. I did the best I could and kept going.
What you can't see with the face on photos, is also that the bottom jaw is slightly longer than the upper jaw. I kept trying to smash it smaller and shorter, and it just wasn't working. I think I cut it off and re-did it at least 2-3 times before I got to this point, and it still wasn't right. But I was frustrated and needed to move to something else and think about what to do with the jaw for a while.
Eyes were next, in my opinion. Never having done my own eyes before, I went searching for a tutorial. Found several I liked, and they all kinda said the same thing. Either print out an iris and attach it to a ball of clay, or take a small ball of clay and cover a corsage pin with it, make a little divot, and paint your iris. Both ideas then use liquid translucent clay to make a dome over the iris.
My printer is currently dry, so printing out eyes was not the best option. But I did just happen to have an entire mess of varying head pins from an old beaded ornament project I had done years ago. I found a suitable size of matching pins, and started to make my eyes.
My next major argument with this guy was over his eyes. He didn't want them painted, so he hid my box of acrylic paints from me. I *swore* I left my box in my closet. I *know* I put them there. But they were missing and no where to be found after several hours of looking. Eventually I gave up and started hunting for an alternative. Looking through my old scrap booking supplies, I found a box of flat sticky backed Swarvoski Crystals in FIRE RED. I knew instantly that this was what I needed to finish the eyes. I very carefully pulled a set off the backing, and inserted them into the well of the clay on the head pin. A little TLS on top, OH and a tiny bit of black clay behind the crystals to add definition and a 'ring' around the red crystal iris. Cured with a heat gun, and whala! We have eyes.
Its also during this point where I made horns and cured the horns at the same time as the eyes.
The finished eyes pre-insert.
And after placed into the head. I had to cut the wire pin part off within half an inch or less to the 'eye' to get them to fit into the head. Even then, I still had to take one of the tools with a very sharp needle and stab guide holes into the head, down into the tape and foil. I left the pin part just long enough to set into the foil for extra stability and strength. Before I placed the eyes in for good, I coated the pin wire with some TLS just for good measure.
Kinda freaky, I think, at this stage. Big bulbous eyes staring out....
So we fix it. Left this picture a bit bigger for more detail.
You can see that besides the upper brows I added some more definition to the snout. I built up the top bone line a lot more, I was trying to get a snarling scrunched up effect, but in the process arrived at this look, and liked it 10 times better. It also gave me a great idea to add some rhino-like horns to the nose! I didn't think to get side pictures at this phase, I'll have to remember that in the future.
After some blending and more detail work, we have... well not the clearest picture lol.
Remember the horns I mentioned earlier briefly? Those are SO SO much simpler than they look. All they are is a bit of pure translucent sculpey III, conditioned, and rolled out into a very tiny snake. I think the snake was maybe 4 inches long, with the width being around 1/16th of an inch? Very small. With the tips of your finger, very gently roll the end of the snake to a sharp and immediate point. Think teeth, or claws, and that's the basic idea. Cut the end off longer than what you'll think it needs to be (remember part of it needs to be embedded in the mouth, foot, head, etc. and won't be seen). I made probably 20 at the same time, from the same snake. I just made points and cut them off. As you are cutting these, make sure that some are longer in length, and some are smaller in length, but always cut in pairs. Making 2 that are the same size, shape, and length will make your life easier when it comes time to choose them for teeth and claws and such things.
Once all your points are cut, take the smaller end of a double ended ball point stylus (found at craft stores and used most often for embossing stencils into paper) and curve the point into a slight "C" shape. Some can be very curved, some almost straight. Or leave some straight for horns. As you can see in the picture, I used 3 of varying curves for interest along the bridge of the snout.
After they are all curved up, take your heat gun and cure them, making sure to keep the gun a safe distance away and constantly moving ... much like what you'd do to blow dry your hair. Keeping the gun too close and in one spot increases your chances for burning the clay. The clay will cure before your eyes, and will soften then harden. These tiny amounts took about 5-6 minutes for the 'full cure'. Let them cool, and set them aside until you need them.
Btw, this method is great for pre-baking tons of shapes, sizes, and colors, and storing them on hand for whatever you might need them for in the future.
Now, just for experiments sake, I DID burn a few of them. The tips turned a reddish brown color, and the clay streaked with the same color brown a bit. My intention was to see if I could get any interesting color effects, but the risk of over curing the clay, even that tiny bit, is not worth it. These burned pieces broke almost immediately when I picked them up with tweezers. Had I tried to use them in the sculpt, they would never have stayed where I put them, and ruined the overall effect I was trying to achieve.
After playing around with the burned pieces, I went back to my dragon head. I needed to insert the horns into the head and make sure they were completely secure.
I did this by creating a tiny hole where the horn was to go, filling it with a bit of TLS, and gently picking up a horn/tooth/claw with a pair of bead tweezers. (Beading tweezers have two tiny cupped paddles at each end, for picking up very small beads and holding them. They work great for small pieces of anything really.) Line the horn up in the hole, and add the rest.
Then, I rolled out another very small snake of green body clay, and cut lengths to place around the base of each horn. Smoothed those out and added bone like details.
I think they turned out pretty cool.
I also smoothed out the upper eye brow ridges, and detailed the nostrils/mouth a little bit more.
OH, forgot to mention. The lower jaw by this point had been cut off once more, and I ended up cutting the wire loop as well. I was able to re-position the wire as a shorter, more compact loop, and re-covered it with clay. It ended up being half the length of the first several attempts, and looks much better this way.
(Don't you just love the inner glow of those red eyes? So spooky!)
In part two, I'll continue with his BIG horns, and further detailing of the face/head.
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