Sculpting To Soothe The Soul...

So I made sure I made some time for CJ yesterday. Barely an hour but it felt really good (and no more procrastination-guilt).

I mentioned in passing in my last post that I wanted to come up with a way of making sure that any further photos I took for the purpose of comparing the sculpt against the reference photos I took from the same position. This way I’d know that any differences were due changes in the sculpture, and not from seeing things from slightly different angles, etc.

So I started off the session yesterday by marking CJ’s current position on the floor of the workshop. Now, should I have to move him out of the way for something I’ll know I’ll get him back in the same spot.

Then I moved a stool back a few feet from CJ and marked its position as well (and now you can see my father’s side of the workshop...).

It was especially important to mark the stool’s position since I move/use it quite frequently. I don’t always sit on it but I do use it a lot – it’s at the exact perfect height to hold tools and a small bowl of clay so it saves me having to step back and/or having my hands full when I want to switch rapidly between two or three tools.

Anyways, with the stool on the other side of the room, I can sit on it and fit CJ in his entirety comfortably into the viewfinder of the camera. By lining his base up with the bottom corner of the screen now I know I’m taking the shots from pretty much the same place each time.

And when I don’t want to go back into the other room and run through all the trouble of taking the pic into Photoshop to compare, I’ve discovered I can do this…

Crude, yes, (it's just me holding the reference pic up in front of the camera, adjusting the distance till it and the sculpt looked the same size) but quite effective. For instance I could see yesterday that the shape of CJ’s head wasn’t quite right. It needed to be higher in the front and rounder in the back…

So I started in on rounding off and reshaping his head.

I was really having fun with it, but I stopped myself before I could get too carried away. One of the sculpting tips I received at the IMATS in Europe was to block in and refine the WHOLE general shape first before creating too much detail in one area. I’ve already gone a bit further with the head than the rest of CJ’s body than I probably should have but that’s OK – it’s letting some of his “personality” come through, and I find it more motivating to work on him now that he has a recognizable face. But I really do need to bring the rest of the sculpt up to the level of the head now, before proceeding any further.

So I removed CJ’s arms for now to have easier access to his torso, and filled in more of the back of his neck.

I think the plan for the next little bit is to work on refining his torso, then move onto the limbs before circling back to further refine his head and neck again.