sculpting tiny guys

It had been some time since I had last put pencil to paper when I opened my sketchbook and drew these four critters. The first came about easily, and I found myself pleased. With some hesitation I set about on a second, it's always a risk drawing the same sort of thing twice. Fortunately it took came about quite well. I'd done it twice and there was half a page left, and before long in total there were four fellas smiling at me.

This was shortly after I'd finished my DOPES (that's for another post, hopefully soon. Ideally, it would have been sooner) and I still had a bit of motivation from that to keep making little guys. Starting at the start I gave it a go with sculpey firm. The trick with sculpey firm is to knead it with a TINY amount of Vaseline. It softens the clay as well as making it a bit stickier. If you bloc your forms in and leave it alone for a bit, the clay will slightly firm up and you can come back to add details a bit more easily. It does still require a gentle hand. These are very small figures, after all.

I switched to beesputty after the second one. The mediums are very similar but very different. I think I used the 4x firmness. I've since been finding the 3x firm more to my favor. Anyway

The tools were finicky so I added the pointy bits after baking with a bit of greenstuff (not my favorite). There's a little more work I aught to do on these, but I'm happy with them.

I call them Skamps. They're very primitive creatures, but they are able to forge some of the strongest metals from essentially junk ore that they harvest from surface rocks with their picks. It is not known their methods and they are especially violent so it is impossible to learn from them. They have been known to tolerate the presence of a Mischievous Man. 

Orcs orcs orcs

 The orc lust is upon me. no NOT  like THAT! I just think they're neat. Anyway, About mid to late October I started sculpting orc faces because orctober. . I did this with beesputty polymer clay on a bottlecap. The method is pretty simple, smoosh a ball of clay roughly head sized onto the cap, poke out where the eyes are gonna be, add a little clay for the snout and nose, refine, refine, refine. takes very little time to do this and it goes quicker once you get the forumla down. Something I like about old orc drawins is the big face wrinkles they have primarily on their upper lip and around their eyes. Just adding a little bit of those and some smile lines around the eyes went a long way to getting that orcy feel. 

here's a lil bit of what the process looks like. I took a video but it didn't wanna upload so whatever. 

that's basically it! 

always learning, on that Grindset

Miniature sculpting is still pretty new to me, I've only been messing around in the 28mm ish scale for about... two years or so  And not in an overly consistent and dedicated kind of way. it turns out the more I do it and the less stress I put on myself to do it right, the more fun and motivated I am. crazy right??? 

 I sculpted a set of around eight guys about two months ago to get made in metal (I'll do a post about that maybe some other time after they're produced). It took me about a week to make them and I had a blast doing it. uh, so now im working on some other stuff.  I want to make armor. I think armor is cool, always have.  I know it's an unpopular opinion but I wiuld say armor is Bad Ass. 

So, that is where that's at.