Friday

The “blank” face was fairly slender, but Shay’s face is quite round, so I added more meat to her cheeks and jowls.

Once again I smoothed out this extra bulk to avoid creating any hard lines.

You can also see in this shot where I’ve gone in and done more work all around the face, adding the bulb and nostrils to the nose, sharply delineating the lips, and shaping her brow into a determined furrow. Material for ears was also added; detailing can be seen in the next shot.

The face looked very pretty, but the smile was wider than Shay’s in most of the reference shots I could find. To narrow it down, I needed to fill out the mass around the mouth, so I added some extremely tiny flakes there to re-position her dimples.

Once blended in and pulled back into a smile, this finally made the face look about right. I would ultimately come back and poke at it many times throughout the rest of the process, but this is about 90% what the final face would end up looking like.

Once I was happy enough with the face, I started adding hair. I had initially planned to diverge from the source model by giving her some sort of combo “shaved sides/braided top and back” thing that I’d never actually quite figured out. However, after spending over a day looking at photos of her for muscle reference, it became harder and harder to picture the character with anything but Miss Massey’s tousled punk-y hairdo, so at this point I just shrugged and went with it.

The nice thing about sculpting a model just for myself is that I can be as fickle and wishy-washy as I like. 😀

As always, tiny bits were laid together in the desired shape, then smushed into their surroundings with metal tools and clayshapers. The hairline was set in place first, and then some more clay was added over the crown of her head to even everything out.

Note: I didn’t realize at the time that this term I had seen in my research was someone else’s nickname. And now that I know, I sort of have another person I want to try sculpting… 😉

The head was “good enough for now”, so I moved on to her adventuring outfit. I always create my models in logical layers– skin, up to inner clothing layers, then outer clothing, then armor, then accessories. I detail each layer as if it were being left visible, even if I plan to mostly cover it up. This dramatically lengthens my sculpting time for each project, but it helps me to figure out how much material actually belongs in each area, and it covers my ass if I realize later that I need to leave some scrap of underlayer poking out through what I thought was going to be an unbroken outer surface.

The style that I had come up with for the character’s armor was that of a rough hodgepodge of heavy plates strapped to relatively loose-fitting clothing. The character as I envisioned her wasn’t interested in the complete protection of full plate armor; she wanted enough plating to let her roll into incoming blows where she was protected, while leaving her otherwise unburdened enough to sprint, climb, jump, and feint her way into arm’s reach of her foes.

If we’re pretending that she’s a D&D character, she is most definitely a Fighter. Specifically, the kind of Fighter that leaves the party cleric constantly sighing and shaking his head. 😛

So for the feet where I started working on her outfit, she wasn’t wearing a set of full metal boots; instead, she had simply had a blacksmith strap and rivet a few thick plates over a fairly plain set of fur-lined leather boots. Leather boots let her feet flex better, making it easier to bound about the battlefield. 🙂

I planned to do the entire cloth layer for the model before adding any armour. With the fairly simple booties roughed out, I started delineating the pants. Anywhere I want to create the edge of an otherwise sorta-tight piece of cloth, I apply a thin clay snake and blend it back into the “skin” in one direction, while leaving the edge visible on the other side.

Even skintight cloth doesn’t wrap itself perfectly around the meaty bulges of its wearer; it drapes from one tension point to another, following the laws of gravity in the space between. As a result, converting the initial muscle layer into clothes involves filling a lot of cracks and fissures with clay snakes to show where the cloth bags loosely over them.

My Mighty Ram Warrior would be wearing Mighty Ram Capri Pants, because… I don’t know know. I just like how they look.

DON’T JUDGE ME

Cloth wrinkles were added very gradually by stringing clay snakes between tension points– for example, here I’m starting to model the slightly baggy crotch area by hanging the cloth between the high points around her thighs.

This is still something I struggle with a bit, so some areas of cloth came out better than others.

The backs of her legs were made much more wrinkled than the fronts, because the cloth would be fairly baggy where it hangs from her butt (i.e., no major tension points to pull the cloth tight).

Once I was happy with the pants, I started building her shirt in a similar fashion, though with much less effort spent on creating folds and creases since only a tiny area of this would end up being visible.

As before, clay is laid down into any trenches and voids in the body layer, then smoothed out.

The armour I had planned out for her involved a heavy chest plate with rows of additional plates hanging down over her belly. I figured that she would wear a shirt tailored to cover all of this area to avoid having metal touch her skin (since I’m told that ranges from “super uncomfortable” to “super dangerous”), but didn’t want to put her in a full tunic or gambeson, so I just made the front and back of the shirt hang down lower than the sides.

With the major cloth bits in an adequate state of completion, I proceeded on to the armour plates, again starting from the feet and working up.

It hadn’t been part of my original design, but when I got down to her boots, I realized that the only choice that made sense for this character was to shape her boots like cloven hooves. I was sort of “getting to know” the fictional character I was creating in the way I always do when I spend hours upon hours drawing or sculpting something, and I imagined that the person who was emerging before me would have specifically requested that alteration when commissioning her armour from a head-shaking blacksmith. 🙂

The “front of ankle” plate was given a steep slope to make it appear to run almost straight down from the leg to the toe (effectively minimizing the angle of the foot), furthering the impression of a goat hoof.

Her armour plates sit on top of her normal outfit, but in all cases I made sure that there were leather straps coming out of each plate to moor them to the clothing items underneath.