Since Hilde's armor has a total of 8 wolves to be sculpted (helmet, 2 shoulders, 3 belt, 2 spear), I thought I'd kick off the actual armor-building on the wolf shoulders.
Design-wise, this is one of the most complicated parts of the armor. To start, I drew a profile of the pauldron to size, attempting to nail down the scale. I decided that the wolf should protrude off of my arm by about 4 inches, so with the pattern made, I roughed out the head-on shape on newsprint. I wanted to built off of a craft foam template with the curve for my arm already built in, but Foameo talked me out of it, so I started with the flat silhouette traced on a scrap piece of MDF instead.
Inside the traced silhouette, I used newsprint, masking tape, and a gatorade bottle to fill out the rough shape and height of what I wanted. I sort of forgot to take pictures of this part, but I'm trying to get better about process shots. Sorry! After the newsprint form was about where I wanted it to be, I covered the entire head in paper clay.
Once the paper clay was mostly dry, with several large reference images pulled up on my laptop, I began covering the rough form with modeling clay. I used one of Foameo's clay tools to help keep all those grooves smooth, with a minimum of fingernail gouges.
I did the entirety of one side first, then did my best to match the other half. It's not 100% perfect, and the snout needs to be evened out a bit, but so far, so good!
My plan from here on out is to finish forming the wolf face and armor piece with the ears separate, fill whatever cracks I can left by the drying clay, then pull plastic versions of it on the vacuum former I just ordered. This way, I won't have to sculpt two gigantic wolf heads for the shoulders.
Design-wise, this is one of the most complicated parts of the armor. To start, I drew a profile of the pauldron to size, attempting to nail down the scale. I decided that the wolf should protrude off of my arm by about 4 inches, so with the pattern made, I roughed out the head-on shape on newsprint. I wanted to built off of a craft foam template with the curve for my arm already built in, but Foameo talked me out of it, so I started with the flat silhouette traced on a scrap piece of MDF instead.
Inside the traced silhouette, I used newsprint, masking tape, and a gatorade bottle to fill out the rough shape and height of what I wanted. I sort of forgot to take pictures of this part, but I'm trying to get better about process shots. Sorry! After the newsprint form was about where I wanted it to be, I covered the entire head in paper clay.
Once the paper clay was mostly dry, with several large reference images pulled up on my laptop, I began covering the rough form with modeling clay. I used one of Foameo's clay tools to help keep all those grooves smooth, with a minimum of fingernail gouges.
I did the entirety of one side first, then did my best to match the other half. It's not 100% perfect, and the snout needs to be evened out a bit, but so far, so good!
My plan from here on out is to finish forming the wolf face and armor piece with the ears separate, fill whatever cracks I can left by the drying clay, then pull plastic versions of it on the vacuum former I just ordered. This way, I won't have to sculpt two gigantic wolf heads for the shoulders.
No comments:
Post a Comment