My previous post about Mr. Woe started me thinking about why I do this. I take tons of in progress photographs of my pieces as I make them, primarily for my own reference. I have somewhere around 8000 photo’s of my art pieces some of them are final pics most of them are in progress pics of the pieces in various stages of completion.
Frank: I had never sculpted a full bust sculpt before, I really had no idea how to do it. So in this case I wanted to take a lot of pictures to keep on hand so if I was successful I could look back and know how I did it. If it was unsuccessful I could look back and see what went wrong. I also take pictures of each stage of the painting process as well. Frank had lots of additional parts on him so I had to mask a lot of them as I painted him as you can see in the second picture.
Basic plain sculpt to paint up Mummy:
Witch: You can see here that her nose in the first picture looks very large, this is because Cellulay (the lumpy stuff) has a large percentage of water thus it shrinks a lot. It will be smaller once it dries. Once it dries I top coat it with Paperclay which is the smooth topcoat. Working with airdry products there is a bit of “you dont know what you are going to get” initially. But after working with it for a few years that has gone away. Her eyes aren finished in the second pic.
Grimferatu: A commissioned piece that I did a few years ago, The customer wanted my version of Nosferatu, This is what I made. One of my favorite pieces. This is him prior to adding ears, eyelids and teeth. I hate making ears. His teeth have always irritated me. Pictures are very important especially when you sell a piece, Initially I made all my pieces just for me. When selling a piece photos are all you have to reference once its gone.
Great post. Very valuable lesson, thanks for sharing your process. Very generous of you.
Cheers!