My New Sculpting Tools and a Piece of Concept Art

So I am very conscious of the phrase "A bad workman blames his tools". However, many a time, I find that the right tools do help make the job much easier to do. From potato peelers to the right screwdriver. So it is with sculpting.

I bought these from a local craft shop and have slowly learnt to use different parts of it for different uses. The ball tip initially confused me, since I have only ever used a spade-like tip and a knife to sculpt. As I rolled it around the clay bits, I quickly realized how fantastic it was to sculpt stuff with. It's kinda hard to show how it works (except maybe through a video), but video format for now just isn't for me. I bet there are plenty of tutorials on youtube for this though.

Here are what they look like:

I like the fact that they come in so many sizes.

Also, I have taken the plunge and decided to post up a piece of concept art for my next sculpt. I drew it myself and yep, I'm no great pencil artist.

Spider-lady! She will probably be the of this particular set.

The reason why I finally decided to put up my concept art despite my reservations about my pencil skills is that I want to force myself to try and sculpt as close to the design I thought of initially. The question that comes to mind, of course, is "Is that so hard?"

Well, yes kinda. When I sculpt, I try to keep in mind that this will end up being cast. Well, whether or not it does is debatable, but I want to try and work within the correct constraints and stuff that gets cast have to be well, 'castable', at least for metal or resin. This means that I have to think about the parts on the miniature that cannot be too thin (such that it would break easily, which is bad for the hobbyist), parts that may have annoying air bubbles, undercuts that are too severe and balance that against having too many parts to assemble, which makes the miniature more fragile for gameplay, can be finicky to assemble and is a time-consuming process.

Maybe I am over-thinking it. I should just get back to sculpting.

Progress in clay

So upon closer inspection, I realized that while the sculpt may have been of chibi scale, it wasn't the SD scale. I cut off part of the bottom of the sculpt and then filled in the armature again. It is closer to the SD scale now. Scale creep is insidious!

The nice thing about clay is that you don't have to wait for anything to cure. You can just carry on working with it from start to finish, if you have that kind of time. I don't but it does mean I don't have to wait for putty to cure now so there is no need for multiple ongoing projects.

I am currently working on the helmet of the guy. It has been quite enjoyable so far. Oh yes, I bought some new tools for clay-shaping last week and have been trying them out. They turned out to be very nice to use so I will be talking about them in the next post.