Vivian

Vivian is a character designed by my good friend and fellow Simpson-ite Tim Bailey. I needed something different to sculpt... something that was a far cry from my own stuff. Tim always had drawings of his Ninja Cats up at work so I asked him if I could try to sculpt one and nail his design in 3D.



So Tim gave me two drawings of Vivian, the one at the top of the page and one little sketch of what she would look like in profile. That was about it for reference. I would ask Tim questions when I got hung up and he'd advise me about how her features should blend into her head shape and stuff like that. We adjusted her kicking pose to be more dynamic than in the sketch. That was fun- getting more energy into her pose! The first time I brought the proto-sculpt to work for Tim to see, I had the head interpreted wrong. It was a bit too wide and a little too big. I sleeked-out her face more and Tim liked it.

Vivian was really a blast for me because it was fun to try and dimensionalize someone else's 2D sketch! Tim had a much better idea of what these cats look like than I did. It was fun to see Tim's face when he saw his character sitting there in the little pyrex baking pan I cooked her in. (She was easy to move around and transport in that pan so I just left her in it.)

I found some construction pics I took when I was putting Vivian together. You can see her armature and what I call, the "doll" I made first. I started doing this armature doll technique with my mother's Ariel sculpture. It works really well. The doll acts like a rigid skeleton, making it easier to sculpt onto with the soft sculpey, plus it's easy to pose the character better than if it was just armature wire.

Doing this sculpture really made me want to see what else I could sculpt using another artist's distinctive style. It was fun taking a 2D sketch and figuring out how everything had to fit together to make that character work at every angle and still look like the artist's drawing!

I was really happy with how Vivian turned out. Tim really liked her as well. I will re-post Vivian when she is all painted up.

Ariel

Ariel was the first human(well semi-human) character I tried to sculpt. One of my Mom's favorite movies is "The Little Mermaid", so I decided to try and get Ariel done in time for Christmas and give it her as a Christmas gift. I really liked Glen Keane's version of Ariel and wanted to try and make the sculpt capture that moment when Ariel is singing "Part Of Your World" in the secret grotto.



I sculpted the rock she is sitting on first. That was pretty easy. When it came to the Ariel figure, I sculpted a sort of pose-able doll with my armatures and sculpey. It had small head, a small rib cage and a small hip structure with thick armature wire throughout that acted as a kind of spinal column. I baked this first and then sculpted over it. This way I had something underneath that was sturdy so I could constantly adjust her pose as I worked.



The process worked really well and I've done all my other sculpts this way ever since. I was always arching her back more or raising her head a bit to match the pose from the movie.




Her hair was fun to figure out because she was underwater and it had to look that way, kinda like there is a current pulling at it. I made the seaweed look like it was being pulled by the water too. I cut strips from a sheet of brass and painted them to look like kelp.




The fingers on the hand of the outstretched arm gave me a little problem... I kept breaking them off while I was working on stuff! I should have put little wires in them as well, but I didn't think of that until too late. I worked around it and kept fixing them.

The tail being very delicate had to be handled the right way. I wanted it to look like the one in the movie, very thin, very feminine, very graceful. I sculpted the fins separate, each with a wire loop inside, and sanded them down to the right thickness. I mounted the fins onto the tail with epoxy putty and sanded the tail down to the right shape. When I painted her you couldn't tell.

I tried really hard to capture the feeling in her face and eyes the way the animation did in the movie. It took a while but I eventually got it. After that the whole thing really took off and I had fun putting it together. My Mom and Dad thought I had bought it somewhere!