Flat Out Fun: Sculpting In Relief Part IX

Introduction

What a ride, huh? So many ups and downs and going sideways, but we’re almost finished! We now have a piece covered in squiggles and defining lines — have we ruined it? Nope! We have one more step to go then we’ll have our beautiful finished relief ready for casting. So lets get to it in this Part IX and finish this puppy up!

Final Finessing

So we did the rough-smoothing earlier, right? Well, now we have the final-smoothing to blend in and soften all the definitions and squiggles and whatnot we now have on our piece and to smooth those brushstrokes the rough-smoothing left. In short, a final clean up. To do this, we’re going to use our soft filberts and our Turpenoid/rubbing alcohol mix and instead of a scrubby motion, we’re going to use a smoothing softer brushing motion. Again, there’s a learning curve with this to learn the right pressure, but you’ll discover it quickly. And again, don’t soak the brush as you want just enough to lubricate it. Too much mix and you'll just end up making more brushstrokes so be miserly with it.

Now what’s great about this Turpenoid/rubbing alcohol mix is that it’s far less aggressive than GooGone and it evaporates quickly, but even so, don’t soak your piece with it. You don’t want mush, you just want a softening and blending of all the fiddly sculpting work you just did. So be gentle and finessed, don’t just brush it on. Be as fiddly with the brush now as you were with your tools. And don’t be afraid to go back in and re-fiddle and then resmooth with back and forth work. This is the time to get things just so. And don’t forget the edges. And check your piece under directional lighting, too, to make sure everything is exactly how you want it.

Here you can see Nashat being finessed with the final smoothing and what a difference it makes. 

You can see how far I go with that fiddling and how far I go with that final smoothing. Learning how to strategically amplify some features is a learned skill because not all features should be equally amplified. The living body is a spectrum of definition plus certain angles and poses will require different kinds of amplification of certain features. Remember always that sculpture is really about playing around with light and shadow so again, check your work under directional lighting to make sure your finessing is to your liking and accurate to your references.

And again, take your time with this final-smoothing step — don’t rush it. This is where your clay really comes alive and things blend together in the most lovely fleshy and cohesive way. It’s so amazing to see your piece materialize so beautifully right in front of you, like magic! So savor this step and Groove your way through it because this is where all that magical stuff happens.

So after you’ve gone over the entire piece and got things exactly as you like them…guess what? You’re done! Bingo! Ta-da and huzzah! You did it! Isn’t your relief beautiful and cool?! Fantastic job! Now your oil master is ready for waste casting to produce a hard resin copy you can further detail out and clean up to ready for production, but that’s another blog topic. However, if you’ve really finessed your oil master and got your signature on it already, it might be able to go straight into production with an immediate production mold. However, I like to play around with a hard resin copy to get everything just so, but that’s just me. Another benefit about producing a waste mold first though is discovering where the mold will catch and tear when your piece is pulled, allowing you to fix that in the resin master so the production mold will pull properly.

Further Concerns

So when to call done? When is done actually done? That’s entirely up to you. Oil clay will let you work for a very long time, but not indefinitely — it does have a life span. Within that lifetime though, you have a lot of time to play around with your piece. The way I call done then is when I can’t go any further on the piece…there’s literally nothing more I want to do to it. I’ve gone as far as I can go. When I’ve hit that mark, I know the piece is fully done. Such satisfaction!

But before you call done, take a picture of it with your phone, look at it through the objectifying lens for a fresh look. Pop that photo into a photo editing program to see it big and up close if you need to. Flip it horizontally to see it from a whole new perspective. Inspect your piece upside down, too. And look at it in a mirror, reversed. Do all these things and you’ll see trouble spots pop out that need your attention — attend to them. When the piece looks right to you after all of this, chances are it’s truly done. And it’s important to call done! Finishing what you start and moving onto the next piece is far more critical to developing your skillset than you may realize. You need the experience of lots of different pieces under your belt to really improve since one piece only has so much to teach you. You need many teachers and each piece is a new teacher. And it’s nice to close that chapter of your journey to open a new blank page for the next piece. So call done and move on. 

Remember you always have to sign your work! If you can date it too, that’s great if space allows. But always sign it with your signature or name or studio logo — something. You can do this now in the clay if you wish but unless you sign the front of it, you often you can’t get good access to a suitable edge for a hidden signing. So what I typically do is sign and date the waste casting I get back from the caster when I can manhandle the hard piece as a resin cast. I just dremel out a scoop along the edge, wash it out with rubbing alcohol, then squish in some epoxy clay. Then I wait for that to stiffen just a little bit then stamp in my logo and carve my signature and date into that, let it cure, then sand it down smooth with the rest of the edge. Then I go on to clean and detail out the waste casting then spray it with primer, and done….ready for production. Phew!

Trouble Shooting

If an area becomes to gooey and soaked, let it rest for a couple of hours and then come back to it. Sometimes it has to sit overnight if it’s really bad. If it’s been way way way soaked, you may have to scoop it out and lay down fresh clay and start that area over again. It’s really important not to soak your clay with solvent! Remember, just enough to lubricate and blend.

If you end up erasing too much of your finesses by too-aggressive brush work, no problem! Just go back in and re-finnese and re-brush, more gently this time. Oil clay will let you do as much back and forth work as you need given you don’t soak the clay with solvent.

Do you see an area you’ve ended up not liking? No big whoop! Go back in with your tools and clay to resculpt it and use your soft filberts and Turpenoid/rubbing alcohol mix to smooth it down, re-finesse, and re-smooth, repeating the steps. You can just skip the GooGone in this situation if the area isn’t too big. Now if it’s something as major as adding an entirely new head, you’ll have to repeat the entire process from the ground up, but that’s okay — everything will blend together in the end.

Conclusion

It’s been quite the creative safari, hasn’t it? A whopping nine-part series and you made it! What a relief! (grin) You tackled so much and triumphed! You problem solved your way through this puppy with beautiful results! Go, you! See, sculpting a relief wasn’t so hard, was it? And just keep at it as it gets easier and faster the more reliefs you sculpt. And the more experience you get, the bolder your compositions will become and that’s exciting stuff right there!

Remember, too, that this is how I sculpt relief work — take from it what you will and dump the rest that doesn’t work for you. Make your process your own to fit your needs and preferences. And have fun! Sculpting a relief should be a joyful, exciting, and fascinating experience, not a trial. If it starts to become too much for you, stop, walk away, and let it percolate so your subroutines have time to catch up. It’s amazing what some time away can do to not only freshen your Eye but also your skills and motivation.

All in all, sculpting relief work is a great way to learn sculpting techniques, tool work, and discovering which clays you like best. It’s also a fantastic way to learn about anatomy, conformation, and type in a relatively fast way. It’s also a terrific teacher of composition and design, of engineering and casting concerns, things you’re going to learn really fast the more reliefs you sculpt. So if you want to learn about sculpting in relatively short order, I highly recommend starting with relief work. It’s an incredible teacher, a great creative adventure, relatively easy and quick, and a source of never-ending fascination and innovation. Just dive in and join the flat out fun!  

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”

- Stella Adler

Flat Out Fun: Sculpting In Relief Part IX

Flat Out Fun: Sculpting In Relief Part VIII

Introduction

Welcome back to this nine-part series exploring how I sculpt a relief. I use the same methods and materials for every relief piece I sculpt and hopefully you’ll find some of what I share helpful for your own work. So in Part VII, we rough-smoothed our relief so where do we go from here? Let’s find out!…

Fussing, Futzing, and Fiddling — The Fun Part

So let your piece rest from the GooGone for about an hour or two then now is the time to go back in with your tools to create detail, fleshy textures, and to define and refine stuff. Don’t use any solvents at this step, just your tools. And you can get as fussy as you want to work in as much detail and stuff as your references indicate. And don’t be timid, really get in there. At the same time though, don’t go too crazy. Again, there’s a Goldilock’s Zone with pressure and harshness that details and defines without being too aggressive. But even if you do unintentionally get too crazy with something, that’s okay. You can futz with it again and again when we smooth over it. But learning that Goldilock’s Zone sooner rather than later is useful to avoid this extra work later on.

So here on Meddur you can see what I mean and how bold you can get with all this fussy stuff. So in your references look for things like wrinkling, bumps, crinkling, stretches, and other fleshy textures and striations, inputting what you See into your clay best you can. Here chaos is your friend, or rather the “organic chaos” of fleshiness so try not to sculpt in a regimented way but try to be as random and organic as possible with your tool strokes. This stage is all by feel, by the way. You can do as much or as little as you want to do, it’s your preference. As for the mane, tail, or feathers you can go over those areas with delicate striations to define and refine the hair as you wish, which is what I’ve done here with Meddur (I also did the same with Nashat, but forgot to snap a photo of his striations "in the raw").

And again, trust the process! Yes, you’re carving up your nicely smoothed areas, but there’s a method to the madness here — it’ll all make sense in the end. And on a personal note, I find this fussy stage to be so satisfying. You really start to see your piece come alive and come together, and it’s also quite meditative to boot. So have some fun with it and take your time. Definitely don’t rush this step, really finesse that fiddling and get lost in the Groove.

Trouble Shooting

If you’ve goofed up, no big whoop. Just add more clay if needed, resculpt, resmooth, and then try again. Oil clay gives you many times to get it right.

If your grooves and definitions and whatnot are too aggressive, that’s okay. You can tame them down with your tools with some tinkering plus we have one more round of smoothing that’ll make short order of that.

Unless it’s your style, try to avoid defining the muscles like an anatomy chart with a neat formulaic approach. Living flesh really looks quite different than an anatomy diagram. (I recommend my 2011 posts, Now About Those Anatomy Charts Parts I and II.) Really study your references to see where hints at muscles are more effective and realistic and where sharply defining your muscles is called for…the living body is a mix of those two and everything in between, a spectrum of fleshy expression.

Keep your tools and your relief cleaned of pilled clay bits and other relics generated by this stage. Just use your tool to carefully remove them and wipe them on a shop towel. I clean my tool often, for instance, often between each tool stroke if clay builds up on it.

Conclusion to Part VIII

Believe it or not, we’re almost done! It’s been quite the creative adventure so far but we’re coming to the end of it. What could possibly be next though? How do we fix all these squiggles we’ve just cut into our relief? Easy! A second smoothing session, something we’ll get to in Part IX. Stay tuned!

“Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.”

- Leo Tolstoy

Flat Out Fun: Sculpting In Relief Part VIII

Flat Out Fun: Sculpting In Relief Part VII

Introduction

Well, we’ve come to Part VII where we’ve completed our roughed out relief and it looks awesome! Congratulations for coming this far in this nine-part series! But there’s still a ways to go. In Parts I-VI we’ve covered everything from types of relief to tools and clay to some potholes to steer round. So what could possibly be left? Well, a lot so let’s just jump right into it…

Rough It Up

So we’ve roughed out or “rough-sculpted” our relief so now it’s time to get rougher with it…we have to “rough smooth” it to knock down all the tool marks our sculpting has left behind. This is actually a critical step in our process, one that can even change the nature of our relief if we aren’t careful. Indeed, if you notice, an intangible energy was injected into your relief during the rough-sculpting stage. It just has this “feel” to it, doesn’t it? This immediacy and, well…energy. We want to preserve that in its totality right to the end. But here’s the kicker…rough-smoothing can kill that energy if we aren’t super careful. See, rough-smoothing can rob a relief of its flair and life because there is such a thing as over-smoothing. You never want to over-smooth your relief! It’s worse than overworking because it can do so much damage that’ll take some doing to fix, to reinstall that life back into the clay. You want to avoid that. So how do we rough-smooth and how do we keep it in control? Let’s find out…

Take your little glass bowl and pop in about one tablespoon of GooGone. Now take your stiff brushes (let’s say the 2 if you’re starting on the legs, mane, tail, or face, or the 4 if you’re doing the large expanses of the torso) dip it in the GooGone, blot out the excess on a shop towel, and scrub your clay in a scrubby, “gently rough” motion, removing the tool marks. There’s definitely a learning curve with this as you want to scrub hard enough to remove the tool marks but not so hard as to mar or distort the clay. There’s a Goldilock’s Zone you’ll learn by feel soon enough. But that’s what you want to do all over your piece, smoothing it all over. Go in the direction of hair on the mane and tail and feathers, but criss-cross your scrubbing on the body, keeping that brush moving evenly all over. On the head and legs though, approach with more caution so you don’t hose up what you sculpted — be more gentle in these areas.

It’s definitely a “go by feel” method, but there are some things to avoid to ensure a good result. First, don’t soak your clay with GooGone. This is aggressive stuff that will melt your clay into a goopy mess if you aren’t careful. You want just enough on your brush to lubricate the scrubbing and no more so dabbing your brush on that shop towel is really important to blot out the excess. Second, it’s okay if there are minor brush strokes but it’s not okay if there are major brush strokes. That means you’re being too rough or using too much solvent. On the other hand, though, third, be bold. Don’t be so timid with the clay that your tool marks stubbornly remain. You shouldn’t have to work an area for too long. Remember, you don’t want to soak your clay in GooGone and the longer you work an area, the more soaked it becomes. Work fast and learn that necessary pressure to be done with an area quickly and move on. Fourth, be mindful of flatter areas so don’t focus on one place on them too long or you’ll eat a defect in their smooth, even contour. Keep that brush moving evenly and criss-crossing to avoid creating errors in your topography. Fifth, don’t keep using a gunked-up brush. See, melted clay is going to build up around your bristles and ferule which are going to be deposited onto your relief — you don’t want that. So clean your brush often in the GooGone and wiping it clean on a shop towel to then proceed. Sixth, don’t over-smooth! You want to smooth just enough to remove the tool marks, smooth areas of unwanted unevenness, and smooth hair and nothing more. You don’t want to rob your piece of its life and energy so learn when to stop and move on to another area as quickly as you can. Seventh, don’t use the same pressure all over the relief. See, you can be rougher on the body but you need to be more gentle on the face and legs and hair — learn what pressures are needed where as it’s not all the same. Eighth, don’t use just one brush movement to smooth but exploit lots of different movements to get into every nook and cranny. For example, there’s spinning your brush and circular motions that can get into certain areas better than a scrubby motion. In short, play around with your brush to find what works best to get the needed result. Ninth, don’t overlook how useful your fingers can be for smoothing tool marks on the large expanses of the body. Just make sure there’s little to no GooGone in that area and definitely don’t dip your finger in it as a lubricant. Ick. Tenth, this isn’t your final smoothing so don’t treat it as it is. This is merely to get rid of those tool marks and no more. We have another round of smoothing in store so don’t be too fussy at this stage. And tenth, don’t forget the edges or sides of your relief, those need smoothing, too.

Trouble Shooting

If you do end up over-smoothing, don’t panic. It just means you’ll have to let your piece sit for a day to calm down from the GooGone and resculpt those areas to reinstill that energy back into them. It’s extra work that could have been avoided, but at least it’s work that’s doable.

If you get goopy melted clay from your brush onto your relief, don’t worry. Just clean your brush, wipe it down on a shop towel so it’s drier, and gently brush it off your piece. Just don’t let that melted clay sit on your relief as it’ll just melt the area beneath it. Like I said, GooGone is aggressive. Treat it with respect.

If you’ve worn a patch or groove of erosion into your piece with overly aggressive scrubbing, never fear! That can happen as you learn how to work this technique. Let your piece rest from the GooGone for about twenty minutes then go back and add more clay into that area and smooth with your tool. Then go back and smooth again, being more careful this time.

Smooth Operator

And voilá — your piece has no tool marks! All gone. Doesn’t it look nice? You can really see what you did with more clarity, too. You can even go back and redo certain areas if you wish with this new clarity then resmooth. Point is, do all your big work now because now is the time to do it. 

So look at Nashat and Meddur to see how far I go with the rough-smoothing. Notice that it’s not too far? Just enough to erase those tool marks and no further. Their energy remains intact. It’s a delicate balance, but one you’ll learn quickly.

Conclusion to Part VII

So now that all the tool marks are gone…we’re done right? Nope! We have a little ways to go, but up next is the fun part, or at least it’s a fun part for me. What is it? Well, it’s the fiddly, fussy stage of sculpting which we’ll get into in Part VIII. 

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”

- Francis Bacon

Flat Out Fun: Sculpting In Relief Part VII