If i build it will they come? Episode Three

I like sculpting. 95% of the time anyway. The other 5% is set aside for the occasions when for various reasons I produce work that to me looks like it was made by a chimp. Using his feet. This can cause despair but my philosophy is it's helpful sometimes to either bring you back down to earth if you're getting sculpturaly cocky (I know what I mean!) or maybe just need to be made to take a break & hold back till you've got something really worth making. Anyway 95% of the time all is well.

After having spent a week or so on various designs for Joey & Robins Power Armour it was now time to start having some fun sculpting a maquette so we could really start to flesh out the design. Like I said last time round sculpting is what I'm best at & drawing is something I do from time to time. So while the design I'd come up with looked cool & all the important people were pleased I personally was not satisfied. I felt that what I'd drawn was a bit spindly looking & not particularly powerful or imposing. Luckily Joey & Robin were happy for me to experiment further in the sculpting & make alterations to the design. As sculpting is my thing I was confident that I could come up with the bigger, harder brother of the guy i'd drawn whilst retaining the essence of the original & the things they liked about it. Fetch me the Super Sculpey!!

I suppose I should try & put some educational material in here. Basically a maquette is a sculpted model that is made so the director or whoever can see the design in physical reality. They can pick it up & check it out & its easier to see how the overall thing looks. If any alterations or changes need to be made they can be done with a minimum of fuss (sometimes). The finish of a maquette varies. Some are just "sketches" done quickly to try & capture a specific mood or feel. Others are left half finished having basicly done their job & some will be finished to an imaculate standard if needed. Usually they're done in plastiline (posh palsticine) or super sculpey. I chose Super Sculpey as it's good to work with for this kind of thing & if you cook it in the oven it sets hard & you can paint it.

Plastiline is just as good to work with but you'll need to mould it & cast it in another material if you want to have a solid painted version of it that people can pick up & handle without ruining it. That would involve a whole new load of processes that these boys couldn't afford at this early stage. Strictly speaking if you were doing the maquette in plastiline then the chances are it's not going any further than that anyway. It's just there to look at. I knew however that if I presented Joey with a nice sized painted model then he'd wet himself & I'd be one step closer to dressing up like a futuristic badass. So Super Sculpey it was. You know the Sculpey you can buy in the art shops? It's the same thing. But more Super. And flesh coloured! Besides, if you put plastiline in the oven it'd just melt.

So to the sculpting. But first music. During the drawing phase it was some nasty drum & bass that guided me. And a fine job it did. However, for the mean bastard I envisioned now something more substantial was required. The Swedish band Meshuggah have pretty much been the soundtrack to the constuction of this suit. If you like intense, brutal music then you'll love this. It can be a bit hectic at first & may confuse you but once you get your head round it it'll turn you inside out. If you're not into that sort of thing then you'll hate it. Does the music I listen to affect what I sculpt? Dunno. Quite likeley. Next time I make a zombie I'll listen to some classical music & see what happens.

Ok. Sculpting. I made this guy just under 50cm tall which is quite big but I knew Joey would get more excited the bigger it was. First off I made an armature from aluminium wire. Basically a stick man to sculpt on to. Armatures are a big deal. The better they are posed the better your sculpt will be. You can spend quite a while getting an armature right on a complex pose. Im not going to go into all the arty stuff about form & movement. This guy was fairly straight forward as I wanted him just standing in a neutral pose. Not only did I have to make something that looked cool I had to make something that looked cool that a person could wear & move around in quite a bit. So I chose the neutral pose so I could try & get my head around a working suit without adding the complications of putting that into a dynamic pose.

I started off by sculpting an anatomicaly & proportionly correct human body. I didnt go into massive detail but made sure the form & proportions were there. The study of the human form is something you will spend the rest of your life doing. Monsters & beasts are all well & good but without a good solid grounding in reality they will be shit. If you can sculpt a convincing horse then chances are you can do a shit hot dragon or something that will tear the throat out of the dragon made by the person who fails to observe the natural world. Downside is you find yourself staring at people to see "how exactly are his/her thighs attached to his/her arse?" I'll skip trying to teach you how to sculpt or this will go on for a few centuries yet.

Ok the man is blocked in & I've double checked proportions etc. Always take measurements throughout the process if you're sculpting something to scale. Especially if it has to look like something everyone knows how it should look. Even if they dont know it! I find it best to use my hands for as much of the sculpting as possible & only start using tools & stuff for ultra refining & getting into the places where my hands can't go. You dont need loads of tools. Most sculptors I know only ever use one or two. It's good to have a selection to choose from but you dont need to go mad. I use the same one for virtually everything. If you buy them they are expensive but most of us just make our own out of whatever works. For the sculpt of the full size suit i did 50% of it with my hands & the other 50% with a bread knife. My landlord is looking for that knife. Back to the maquette.

Time for some armour. I had my drawing in front of me but the real image was in my head. The trick i was trying to accomplish was to put an average bodied man (we have no actors yet!) into a suit that gives him slightly super-heroic, comic book proportions. And have him run around in it. Without it looking shit. Research was key on this one. You wouldnt believe how many websites there are out there by blokes making their own Stormtrooper armour! I looked at the Iron-Man suit alot to see how it was put together. Theres a guy on Youtube making his own suit of Iron-man armour who has regular updates on his progress that is useful. Dunno what he's going to do with it when it's finished though. Go down to the park in it or something.

I started on the torso first as this would then pretty much dictate where to put everything else. The shoulders were raised much higher up & made broader with the addition of some shoulder armour. Or "pauldrons" if you want to be posh. The chest has been beefed up to
Shwarzeneggerian size. I think I just invented a word. The thing I found with most home made suits is they always seem to leave massive gaps between the parts of the body that bend - elbows, knees etc. I could'nt have this really as it's meant to be an all encasing suit so I've cut it quite close. I'll just have to see how it goes!

All in all I spent about 2-3 days on it. I wanted it to be detailed but not hyper finished. It's still quite rough in places but not so much so that it looks rubbish. It lends to the rugged & worn look we want for this. It was essentialy an excersise for me to start figuring out not only the shapes & stuff but how i was going to put it together in a way that would work. The hands & feet are, as far as I'm aware going to be customised motorcycle boots & gloves so I was'nt too concerned with those but gave them enough attention to do the job. Photographing it was a bit of an arse as it's quite tall & I'm no photographer. It took a while for me to figure out how to get a shot that did'nt look like a hall of mirrors version. He still looks a bit dumpy in the photos but that also may be due to the unexpected snag of putting comic book proportioned "greaves" onto a normal sized leg & still allow it to function as a leg but I'm learning!

So with the photo's emailed to Joey & Robin & swift replies expressing much dribbling I descended to the kitchen.
"Bake at 130 degrees C (275F) for 15 minutes per 6mm (1/4") of thickness" That's what it says on the instructions on the side of the box. It's not really the case though. Experimentation has taught me that just about anything I sculpt in sculpey turns out fine if I bake it for 20 minutes at 100 degrees in an electric oven. My landlord has a gas oven & I've never cooked a sculpt in one of those before. A quick google told me to heat the oven to just below gas mark 1. I was dubious but continued. First snag - the maquette was just a little too big to fit in the oven so off came his head to be placed beside him. Right he's in. Got 20 mins to kill now so coffee & tobacco time. I went upstairs to roll a fag & upon returning to the kitchen I glanced into the oven to see my maquette lying face down having snapped at the ankles. Bastard! My armature wasnt strong enough there & the sculpey was quite thin compared to the rest of the body. As sculpey cooks it goes a bit softer & it's the cooling process afterwards that makes it set hard. The sculpey had softened with insufficient strength to support the body & down he came. Bastard! Fetch me the Milliput. Its a two part epoxy that sets like concrete. According to the box you can fix boats with it but i wouldnt get in it. Luckily heating milliput causes it to go off quicker so a very quick repair job was done & back in he went. Thankfuly that was the only drama in the kitchen that day. I left him to cool down for a couple of hours & got my paints out.

I'll try & hurry it up now! Firstly he was given a base coat of black as I wanted him to be quite dark & dirty. A white base coat lends itself to lighter paint schemes. Then a covering of gun metal. The shoulders & parts of the arms & legs were metalic black. I then loaded up my brush with black paint, dipped it in water & coverd the whole thing making sure the brush was nice & wet throughout. A "wash" for those in the know. Then with a cloth I removed all excess black which left the gun metal looking dirtier & leaving recessed areas looking dark & shaded whilst filling all the little areas of fine detail. I then drybrushed on various silvers to make him look scratched & beat up. The whole thing was finished off with combinations of washing & drybrushing various earthy, dirty colours to rough him up a bit as he does hang out in some fucked up places. This was a very quick paint job & took about 2 or 3 hours I think.

All in all he worked out well & certainly got Joey & Robin frothing at the mouth. It was now time to start making it for real..............



Take it easy! Michael

Catch up on episodes one & two