(the joy of microsoft paint-ing)
Whoa, I haven’t posted anything in almost a month! In my defense, I got busy with other things… with life in general… it happens. But now I’m back to show off some sculpting progress and a concept image, complete with some beautiful MS Paint artwork!
Rembrandt would be jealous. 😏
Yeah, ok, so it’s basically the artistic version of e-waste. I never claimed to be good at drawing! But it does, at least, get my concept across, somewhat, a little bit, maybe, kinda. The character is (supposed to be) Haru Yuuki from The Idolm@ster, noted for her love of soccer and thus the perfect subject for a sculpt that I started in the middle of maximum World Cup hype.
I’ve made some progress on the sculpt since the last time I posted about it. In case you didn’t see it before, here’s where I started:
The armature was built with twisted aluminum wire and bulked up a little bit with epoxy putty.
On top of the armature, I apply clay in the general form of the muscles and bones that might be visible under the skin. This provided a base structure that I could then refine into a more finished body. Below is an in-progress picture of this process:
You can see that I’d started adding more clay to the torso and smoothed out the gaps to create a seamless surface, although the limbs hadn’t yet been refined.
Here it is after some more work:
For a base body, I’m quite happy with how that turned out! Most of what you see here won’t even be visible in the final sculpt, but it will give me a structure to build the clothes off of and create a more believable figure. I tried to keep the build looking athletic (since, y’know, she’s playing soccer), but I also tried to keep it even thinner than an athletic body would realistically be, since the clothing will add a fair bit of thickness. Looking at my previous GKs (particularly Yume-chan), I can’t help but feel like the clothing ended up looking a bit too thick and stiff to be normal fabric. One of my goals for this and for future sculpts is to get better at separating the texture of a thicker fabric like denim from the finer wrinkles and flowy-ness of, say, t-shirt material.
I’ll plug away at the clothes next, then start working on the head, hands, and shoes. Speaking of that, it occurs to me that I somehow haven’t done a character wearing shoes yet! They were all either barefoot or wearing a kigurumi that covered their feet. Since Haru is playing soccer, I’ll have to remind myself to include the cleats… somehow I keep feeling like I’m going to forget them!
In news not related to shoes, something that occurred to me recently is that crumpled aluminum foil, which I’ve been using to bulk up my sculpts, is NOT a good filler if you’re planning to use pressure to create molds! Foil works great to build up large pieces up quickly, but if you stick it in a pressure pot it will COMPRESS UNDER SAID PRESSURE AND COMPROMISE THE SCULPT! I don’t how it took me this long to realize this, but now that it’s clicked for me, I am absolutely kicking myself for the oversight. On every previous sculpt, I’ve been feeling like the cast copies somehow didn’t quite live up to the prototypes that I’d started with. I told myself that the resin was revealing irregularities that the clay didn’t, and the molds weren’t actually different… but now my initial suspicions are confirmed! I’m glad I know now, but it sure wish I’d realized it from the outset. Suffice it to say, I don’t intend to use foil anymore. Now you know why I’m using Milliput as a filler in this sculpt. It provides more structure than foil, anyway, although it’ll be a lot harder to re-sculpt if I need to make drastic changes.
That’s it for now! With this, I should hopefully be back to my regularly-scheduled programming. I’m excited to see Haru come together, and I feel like with every new creation I learn a little more about the whole kit-making process and a little less likely to fail. Sometimes, that’s all you can hope for!
EDIT: LOLOLOL Bluesky marked my post as “adult content.” Guess that means I did a good job on the sculpt?
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