Bruce was the first sculpture I did from a drawing. I'd played around with kiln-fired ceramic clays in high school, but never sculpted with super sculpey before. I had drawn this picture of Bruce while I was between scenes on Simpsons my first year of doing layout. My friend Eric Thomas really liked the big toothy grin he had and said it would be cool to see that in three dimensions! He asked if I had ever sculpted and I said not really. So he dared me to do it. I accepted.
Bruce doesn't have an armature or anything like that. He was my first one and I didn't really know what I was doing, so he is solid scupley. I used a pencil as a brace to support his big head. However, little did I know that sculpey gets softer when you bake it and THEN gets hard. His head came off the first time I baked him.
So I fixed his head and re-baked him, using an old shoelace tied to the oven rack to keep his head in place while he cooked. I started leaving the sculpture in the oven after turning off the heat and letting it cool down real slow so it wouldn't crack or fissure so much from cooling down so fast.
It was challenging to make the sculpt look exactly like the drawing from that one angle and keep the whole thing working with everything else at the same time. But that's the trick isn't it!? A good sculpt works at ANY and EVERY angle.
Bruce was alot of fun. Eric had told me that sculpting would help my drawings look more solid, and he was right. I started thinking beyond the flat sketching and really dimesionalized how shapes and forms worked together now that I had done something 3D instead of just 2D. I gave Bruce a little tatt and a band-aid just to be stupid. For the longest time he was just painted with flat grey primer. When I wanted to enter him in the employee art show at Film Roman one year, I gave him his speckled blue paint scheme. I think it worked well. Keep on smilin'!!
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