Max's Feet Sculpt

This ones a bit tricky... Im guessing the people (you) reading this blog have most likely either seen a picture of what Max looks like by now or seen the showreel of my 2nd year (that's not up on vimeo at the time of posting this, but for future people who are reading this, it might be up now.... exciting!)

So if you have seen Max you'll know he has muddy, bare feet!

What you'll see here is my thought process when starting sculpting, For most of the making stage you'll see that Max has some weird pre shoe idea that I thought I would go with, but as you know I end up changing it and will show when in a future post!

But for now, on to what I was thinking at the time.

In an earlier post I mentioned why I cover my ball joints in PTFE tape, one reason because it prevents clay getting stuck in the ball joints, but the main reason i use it when sculpting is that, the ptfe tape needs to be wrapped around the joint before casting in silicone when the mould is ready, so I wrap the joint when sculpting to ensure there will be no extra padding or bulking out when it comes to casting, as I know il be sculpting the foot very close to the armature!

(If that makes sense)

I then began to add plastiline to the armature to sculpt a foot.

When I wanted to create gaps in between the toes I was just hitting and exposing the armature inside! 

I didn't want to extend the toes outwards as I believed the feet would then be to big therefore I looked for another solution and found this image.

I thought the shoes on the right would be a good fit for Max so I then went with the idea of him having shoes.

The thought was to keep the shoe as simple as possible to mould up, and then details of the shoe and laces would be added on later (similar to how I did Blob's crocs)

So I planned on just having the sole of the shoe sculpted as well as indents carved out so I could add his toes and flesh colour within that later to show that the shoe is falling apart

I then used a rake tool, this was to ... well .. rake in to the clay. This was a new technique for me. By doing this process it help carve away any uneven surface and makes it easier to smooth out later.

The feet were smoothed and are now ready for casting.

I'll explain the orange bit later, but it's something that you should ignore as it's a mistake that I made!