Head and Body Part 1

So yeah you may see from the title it says part 1, thats because the head and body have been hard work to do! Mainly the head, but you'll soon find out the problems I've had. 

But you know what they say, mistakes are good! 

So stay positive! Even if you're going mad inside!

Lets start with the head!

As you know, I have made a balsa inner core to keep the head light, if not, 'bulking out' page here:

http://thomasvaughananimation.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/bulking-out-body.html

so with that, I started covering the head with Premo clay, this was my first time using this, and I decided to use it as it comes in a variety of colours, plus it can be baked and hardened in the oven!

A mixture of different colours were used to achieve the colour I wanted.

After getting relatively bored mixing more and more pieces of premo I started to drift off subject and ended up with a pretty cool camouflaged slug!  

Just thought I'd share that photo with you!

I then got back on topic and started mixing again.

This was the final result. The colour kept whilst baking, which was good. I would now have to mix the same colour green to place on the head for an eyebrow, to enable me to animate it.

 But yeah, the head was sculpted, it was green, that was that, finished........

Is what I wished had happened

As you can see from the images of the head above there are cracks and dents, and the whole thing is very uneven, which got me rather annoyed as this is not the standard I wanted in my work...

Therefore I knew I now needed to find a way of improving the head to a standard I wanted!
But before that I decided to move on to the shape of the body, as I now have a rough scale of the head.

Beginning the Body!!






I began by wrapping the balsa in cling film (saran wrap, if your not from the UK), this was to make things easier for me in the long run.

As after sculpting the bodyand making a mould, the clay would then need to removed from the inner core. Applying cling film to the balsa will enable me to remove the clay quickly and cleanly without damaging the sculpt.








Once wrapped, sculpey firm was added to the core.

Clay kept being added to the balsa, and then the head was placed on top. I then took a loop tool and began shaving away any excess sculpey, and started defining the shape.


After shaving the sculpey I was left with a rough shape of Blob's body.



And from the shreds of his body grew some nicely shaped eyes.
That's enough for the time being, more on head and body next time!

Legs & Crocs!

My next step was sculpting the legs and crocs. First I started with the legs.

I knew I was going to sculpt a very simple design for the legs, being thick towards the top and thin at the bottom, and generally smooth.

Also as I'm casting the leg separate to the crocs, I can recast the same leg, therefore only one leg needs to be sculpted.

The top of the legs is angled upwards on one side, but rotating the leg in the opposite direction will create the left leg, as there's no markings on the sculpt to determine which leg is which! 

Finished leg sculpt

Once the leg had been finished, I checked to see that it still fit into the K+S of the croc and how it looked. Once I was happy I then made a start on the crocs!

I thought I would try to sculpt the feet simultaneously to ensure when I make an alteration on one foot, I would then do the same on the other, to try and ensure they look very similar.

       

  

The bands of the crocs were easily made using a sculpting tool. I began by rolling out a a thin pice of sculpey, I then took the gripped/textured side of my sculpting tool and rolled it on the sculpey to create an imprint.  Once I had the textured, I wrapped it around the croc.  

Finished crocs..... or so I thought!

Once I had the two side by side, I could clearly see they were not the same. 

My initial plan was to have identical crocs with, one left, one right. But the two crocs ended up looking quite different to one another, with one looking more flat.

But when considering the amount that was needed to get right:

- The overall size of the croc

-The thickness in sole

- The thickness in the textured band

- The holes

-The curvature of the croc

I then realised that would be a major task to get right in a space of a couple of days!

I then had a decision to make, to try and reshape the shoe and get it similar or, rip the thing up!

...........

I ripped the thing up!

   

Considering the amount of skill, time and detail that was needed to sculpt an identical left and right shoe, I did not have the time at this point to retry it. Therefore I decided to tear the clay off one armature, and re-sculpt a croc which would be generic i.e neither left or right footed. This meant I would be able to use the one croc as both feet, when moulded and casted.

Here's how the finished croc looked!

Now let's go do the head and body!