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.