horse and rider sculpture

[CKWorth]

Hi all. I'm posting this with a bit of reluctance. Sculpture is really not my area. I've got to consider this my first serious attempt at sculpture, and is the first time I've even touched the stuff in two years.

It was quite an experience getting this thing done. The amount of time it took is embarrasing, nearly two months, and the horse took up most of that time. I was never happy with it. Had all kinds of accidents as it progressed. The worst happened on the last baking of it. The horse's legs got too soft in the oven and buckled when I went to take it out. It all came toppling over. The rider's neck broke, his right leg was nearly shattered, parts of the mane, and all of the tail broke off, one side of the saddle broke on three separate ocassions. The top of his cape came off in the fall. Two of the horse's legs were weakened and broke later. And I managed to glue it all back together and cover it all up with paint. :jump2:

The characters here are from my little fantasy world idea. Nicholas is the guy's name and the horse is Katie.

http://www.spherenoire.com/forumart/sculpture01.jpg
http://www.spherenoire.com/forumart/sculpture02.jpg
http://www.spherenoire.com/forumart/sculpture03.jpg
http://www.spherenoire.com/forumart/sculpture04.jpg
http://www.spherenoire.com/forumart/sculpture05.jpg

[mgc3003]

"...Sculpture is really not my area..."

Yeah right! This is great!!! Hearing about the woes it gave you --- well it least it turned out so nice in the end! There are probably guide books that could advise you on how to work in the future to avoid the problems you had with the structure.

That thing on the horses head is brilliant, and the anatomy all around is fully convincing. Wonderful piece, congratulations!

[tyboogie]

cool! nice job!! i like everything about it--feels like the atrayu and artex relationship from neverending story--kinda. One thought--the size of the horse feels more like a pony i think. really nice work---ty

[Zeravla]

very nice

[ShawnYe]

Wow nice work! Although I'm not into scuplting but I have touch on ceremics and pottery. I know how it feels like when all your hard work comes out in pieces from the kiln. Feels terrible!! Glad it all worked out fine for you in the end. I find that the horse looks relatively small and could need a little more muscle definition to the hind legs and body. The rest looks great. Are you going to do more sculptures like this? If not you should consider! Finally, do you mind telling us the size of this?

[scorpionfist]

lookes great. I feel your pain when you discussed things breaking and shattering...i've had my fair share of artwork getting out of control...let me ask you...what is inside that horse? did you use some kind of wire skeleton? I want to sculpt a dragon ( i saw reign of fire today) but i was wondering how to start....any tips you have will greatly be appreciated...again great work man! check out my sketches if you have time.
:chug:

[Scotty]

Yes!! Another sculptor. This is really nice man. I checked your site, and this resembles your sketches quite well. I love the horse/pony. I say keep doing sculptures!! I too have felt the sting of having a sculp fall apart. I almost totally burned my first one BLACK. It's frustrating..........but if you keep at it. It's very rewarding.:)

[Octave13]

This is very cool! I would like to have seen some in-progress shots of this. You wouldn't happen to have any, would you? Please post 'em if you do, I'd love to see how you went about doing this. Excellent work.

[Da7thSamurai]

Nice sculpture, Seems like you had alot of trouble. Did u use any armature wire?

[CKWorth]

Wow, thanks everyone for the great comments. They are very encouraging.

mgc3003: Hehe, well sculpture is certainly not something I've put a lot of time into before. So I'm very happy this one came out so well. I should definitely look into books though, if I am going to try it again.

tyboogie: Cool, I hadn't thought of there being resemblance to the Never Ending Story here (one of my favorite movies). The horse is on the small side, but she is supposed to be a mustang, and they are smaller horses, plus the guy did turn out a little big for her.

Zeravla: Thanks.

ShawnYe: Thanks for the comments. I had a lot of trouble with the muscle definition in the legs, I either had too much or too little. I'll do better next time. ;) She is a small horse, but what really happened is the guy was sculpted too big. The size of this is 1 foot from nose to tip of tail, and 11 3/4" from hooves to top of his head.

scorpionfist: Well, to start the horse I made a really simple wire skeleton. I think it was one wire running through it from head to tail, and then two other wires wrapped around that to make the front and back legs. The real mass was done with aluminum foil. I packed a lot of that into the body and neck. Having this kind of stuffing inside of it will make the whole thing lighter and you will use a lot less clay. Good luck on the dragon. And I looked at your sketches. Very good! I really like the animals.

Scotty: Hi Scotty. Thanks a bunch for the encouragement. You are right, it is very rewarding. :) I would like to try this again, but this time be better prepared.

Octave13: Let's see, in progress... I don't have much, I stopped taking them after a while. I just have one of the horse's body, and then a bunch of the horse before painting. I think you can see the detail of her better in the unpainted photos.

Da7thSamurai: Thanks. Yep, I used wire, but it was not very strong, and couldn't support the weight of all of it.

Here are progress photos (sort of):

http://www.rsad.edu/~cworth/nicholas/mount.jpg
http://www.rsad.edu/~cworth/nicholas/unpainted01.jpg
http://www.rsad.edu/~cworth/nicholas/unpainted02.jpg
http://www.rsad.edu/~cworth/nicholas/unpainted03.jpg
http://www.rsad.edu/~cworth/nicholas/unpainted04.jpg

[jakub]

WOW! this is very cool indeed! must have been a real pleasure to solour it ;)

[Octave13]

Gorgeous! I love how sculpey looks, un-painted, while you're still in the process of creating, with it. Just shows the raw talent of the artist. You should look into getting a pasta rolling machine that's normally intended for rolling out strips of pasta for lasagna, spaghetti, angelhair, linguini, etc... but it works really great for sculpey, too. You can roll out lengths of clay as flat and thick as you want, which can be used for sculpting hair, straps, cloth, etc...

http://www.vlo.com/images/imperia.jpg

Hope that helps. :) Keep sculpting!

{EDIT} hah.. didn't read what you said about already using aluminum foil. Still buckled over, wow. I'm wondering exactly how big that thing is, now. :p

[andreasrocha]

Turokess....the sculpture is amazing. I wonder how great you would get if you DID take sculpting fantasy figures seriously.

I would pretty much, like to follow your footsteps, and also try out something like your work. It looks possible (but that is always the wrong impression). A lot of work must have gone into this figure.

Well, what I wanted to ask you, was if you could sum up your workflow. I understood that first you used a wire 'bone-strutcture' and that you covered it up with aluminium foil to give it mass. Then you used clay to make the 'true' skin. Is this 'clay' sort of kneadable with a smooth surface and looks synthetic? And how did you sculpt the form. You probably did not use your fingers or otherwise the figure would be full of fingerprints. Did you use a tool? What kind of paint did you use? Special Inks to paint those little toy-soldiers that you get in modeling shops?

I understand very little about sculpting (as you can see from my questions) but I would like to try it out. I would very much appreciate it if you could answer some of my questions. And by the way, is there any site about this kind of sculpting on the net?

Thanks for sharing your work.

[McNallyism]

Hey Turokess,

Thats an excellent first project! You definitely have skill when it comes to working in three dimensions, so keep going. You've got most of the fundamentals down, so now its just a matter of wrangling in the small stuff.

For instance the anatomy on the horse, and the size relation to its rider. Most of the horse looks fine, but the back legs really needed some more work. The knees are the main thing that stick out to me. If you look at a good antomy book with diagrams of horse anatomy, you will see that the knees dont really clear the bottom of the horse's stomach/groin area because of the shortness of the femur in relation to the other leg bones. A really really good reference for animal anatomy and anatomy in general is the "cyclopedia anatomicae" by Gyorgy Feher. Another good reference for shape breakdowns in animals is "the art of animal drawing" by Hultgren. Or you could just find a good sculpture of a horse to look at. Or even *gasp* the real thing!

Another area worth considering is the pose of the sculpture. The pose you ended up choosing is very static, with the legs evenly spaced and right next to eachother. THe pose you started with in the early stages of your horse was much more natural looking and compostionally interesting. Remember, symmetry and static poses = boring! This goes for the rider as well. Check out Fredrick Remmington's cowboy sculptures to see how the horse and rider can work to create a dynamic composition. Anyway, I don't mean to berate your sculpture in any way, I'm just trying to offer some helpful suggestions. I look froward seeing more of your work.

-Sean

[CKWorth]

Octave13: Hey, thanks a bunch, I've seen people use those things before for making hair.

andreasrocha: Hi, sorry for my late response. I'll try to answer your questions, though I am an amateur at this myself when it comes to most of it. I used armature wire for the basic frame. I don't remember exactly what the stuff was called, but you can probably find it in an art store. It's very bendable and easy to shape. However, I have been told gardening wire works just as well, but is probably not as bendable. That may be a good thing for stability, though. Then I used aluminum foil for all the mass. The clay I used is called Super Sculpy. It is thicker and holds it's shape better than the white sculpy. The box has directions for baking the sculpy. As for tools, well, the majority of that was actually done with my fingers, I just did well at getting the fingerprints out by smoothing it. I also used these tools:

http://www.spherenoire.com/woodtools.jpg

Getting the form just takes time and building up the clay. Don't always look at it from the same angle for too long. Switch views as you work. For paint, I used plain old acrylic. I don't know what else is available. Some people use enamel paint, but I don't know much about the stuff. And then other people airbrush their stuff. I don't know of a site at the moment for tutorials. I would like to find one myself. :D

McNallyism: Thanks for the words. I ran into a lot of problems with the horse due to the sculpy getting too compact on the body and causing it to get very heavy. That is why the legs ended up the way they did in the final and not the initial way I had planned. Lots of baking problems with them. Hehe, I actually had reference all over the place. I collect really high quality model horses and have over 100 of them to look at. Plus a muscle diagram of them, plus I am around the real thing a lot. Perhaps with another months work, I might have gotten it closer. :D Thanks for the name of the book. I have yet to get a really good anatomy book of both humans and animals.

Thanks again everyone.

[andreasrocha]

Turokess....thanks a lot for the explanation.
Much appreciated.