Sculpting away

It has been quite a while since my last blog post. I think I say this every time now but time really does fly quickly when your busy bodying about!

Recently I have been concentrating on developing my sculpting skills. A while ago I asked my good buddy, the amazing JEZ TUYA if I could have a go at sculpting one of his characters but never got round to it and also I am a HUGE admirer of his work and was scared of messing it up beyond recognition.  Then a few weeks ago I decided" Hey, if I mess it up no one is going to see it, right?"

He has so many awesome designs and I found it hard to pick one. In the end I decided  to try out a few.
This was a great exercise for me as it made me look at shapes in a way I wouldn't have before. Jez really does know his shapes!!

This is also the first time I have properly sculpted in Super Sculpey. I never really liked it before as it is really soft but I have been following other peoples formulas of working with it. Basically I sculpt the main shape of the head with a few details like eyes mouth and nose then I will bake it and add hair and beard. Then bake it again and add anything else that needs to be done. I leave the body till last as I know I can work with the head without ruining it.
Due to not having much display and storage space I have only done character busts and it also saves on the amount of sculpey I have.

First up is Captain Ahab

Jez's illustration

Illustration is owned and ©2012 Jez Tuya

My sculpt. Its not 100% bang on but I think it bares enough resemblance

Then all three of Jez's awesome characters

Illustration is owned and ©2012 Jez Tuya

And my sculpts of the other two chaps 

Starbuck 

Queequeg

I had so much fun doing these sculpts and learned a lot from the whole process. I am also quite surprised at how quick it took me to do each one. I think Captain Ahab took me a night and an afternoon and probably the same time for the other two. Maybe one day I will paint them.

Dr Jekyll
The past week I have been working on one of my own designs that I had in my head. It was supposed to be Jack the ripper but as usual it didn't quite go to plan. I ended up having to paint this chap as from all the baking that he went through there were a lot of really burnt parts.There are a few things Im not to happy about with it but I am totally taking it as a lesson learned situation. You first have to be bad to get good, right?

So here is Dr Jekyll

And a few other different shots of it

So that's about it for the moment. I do have some really super dooper exciting news to blog about but not until the end of next month. But I am sure I will do more work in between then and now to blog about. So until then "Never give up! Never surrender!" super geek points if you know what that is from :)