Vivian (in color)

Vivian is all painted! She looks great, doesn't she? Tim gave me a color mock-up for me to use to match colors. Her paint scheme seems simple but the shades have light grey in them, making the colors very pastel and "powdery" looking. I think the colors make her look alot more feminine and soft.

At first , I didn't think the color scheme would look that good on the sculpture, but after I mixed the paints and matched the colors from the model, I started to like them! Nice job, Tim.

Her eyes really stand out now that she is painted. She looks focused and alert! I put a gloss finish on her eyes, mouth, and teeth.

Yes, she has panties. Be sure to check the little video turnaround of her in the Video Bar!

Vivian was a fun project. I'm glad she turned out well and Tim was really happy with her.

Good times! JUDO-CHOP!!

Li'l Indy and Kodos...and some worms!

One year when I was at home in North Dakota over Christmas break, I bought some of the pre-colored sculpey to experiment with. I made some simple animals like a pig, a hippo, a bird- just to see how the stuff handles. I made one for each of my brother Marc's little girls. When I got back I sculpted this little German shepherd pup with the stuff for a friend's birthday. He's modeled after my own shep, Indiana.

The colored stuff is great because you don't have to paint anything once it's baked. However, it gets really soft really fast and becomes kind of difficult to put any real details on the sculpt itself.

Since it does get really soft, you can easily blend and swirl two colors together. I tried to kinda blend the colors of the pup's tummy fur together to see if I could make it look more like hair.

The pics don't really show it but the blue sculpey in the tile floor has a pearly iridescent color to it that's pretty cool. It made the tile really contrast with the texture of the puppy.

I think if you really wanted to do detailed stuff with the colored sculpey, it might work better to sculpt the piece in phases and put the whole thing in the fridge for a bit between each session. Then you could pick it up and handle it a little better before the sculpey absorbs the heat from your hands and gets too soft to work with again. It works great to crank little fun little things with though!

Big Indy and Li'l Indy.



Another kind of sculpey I tried playing with was the bendable sculpey. After you bake it, it stays rubbery so you can bend longer pieces and they don't break! First I made these worms.

Then I made this little sculpt of Kodos from Simpsons. I figured his tentacles would be fun to bend around and play with.

The bendable stuff works great. But like the other colored sculpey, it gets really soft and is hard to detail with. It's fun to make stuff and crank on it when your done though. The stuff won't break! It just bends!

I gave Kodos to my buddy and fellow-Simpsonite, Ernie Keen, as a surprise. He was surprised!

DOG NOT TO SCALE

Garvin & Jerry

These two ostriches were gifts for two ladies, Joanna and Luella, that used to babysit me. I think my Mom went to college with them. Garvin and Jerry are their husbands names. Anyways our families all grew up together and I've known them and their kids since I can remember. These ladies are school teachers who have worked together forever! So when I came up with the idea to give them the sculptures, I thought it would be cool to make them in such a way so that they work together or by themselves. The bases fit together and make a goofy scene with both of them, but still work as a sculpture when they are each by themselves.

The tricky part was that I had to make everything twice! I did most of the work on one first to see if the design was going to work and when it did I started the other one. It's always hard for me to match or mirror something I've sculpted like ears or hands or fett. I always seem to make one that I think is better than the other one. These guys turned out to be a pretty close match.

I used the same technique of baking some small structures onto the armature to make it easier to sculpt and pose while the sculpey is still soft. The armature was kind of tricky because of the skinniness of the legs, while still having a pretty hefty set of leg muscles, along with the a big turkey body. It was sort of finding a balance so he would stand on his own and then try to keep that going through to whole process.

These guys were really fun because I wanted them to look sort of graceful yet goofy... kind of what I think of the ostrich anyway!

The white color on the first one is primer and the tan ostrich is plain fired sculpey.

I had wanted the feathers on their heads to look like Big Bird's feathers from Sesame Street. I put some thin black wires in the top of the heads and in their necks as hair. Then I pressed tiny pieces of epoxy putty onto the wires on their heads and let it dry. When I painted the putty, it looked like tiny feathers on top of hair just like Big Bird.

I had never done anything like feathers either! They were fun to figure out. I had to put some thin wire armatures in the big rear feathers and even smaller ones in the skinny wing feathers that I wanted to flair away from the body. I scratched some lines in the soft sculpey before I baked it. I figured I could sell the idea of them being feathers more with the paint of it didn't work. I think it worked out fine!

The bases were very simple. To simulate the sand I just pressed a wired brush into the sculpey before I baked it. I added some wire grass later too.

So why ostriches? One summer when I was very young, all our families were camping together and Joanna told us kids about how she had had an ostrich as a pet when she was a little girl growing up in Chile. She would get to ride on its back! Well I thought that was the coolest thing ever! I'll never forget that story. Good times!

Garvin and Jerry were very well received! By the way, Garvin's wife got Jerry ostrich while Jerry's wife got Garvin ostrich. What?!