About a year ago, I sculpted a model. It was a very simple joke:
And we all had a good laugh. In the closing notes for that writeup, some thoughts passed through my mind:
An interesting thought occurs to me in the aftermath of this piece. Sculpting and painting the model took a grand total of like… a week? And I was procrastinating pretty hard (specifically, playing a whole bunch of X-Com) throughout a lot of that time. But given that time as a base unit, in theory I could do an entire 10-model army of similar chibi Infinity models (i.e., adapting canon uniforms over a cartoony body) from scratch in like two or three months.
I have no idea what to do with that realization, exactly, but it’s interesting to ponder.
“Hrm”, mused the potato.
I pushed the thought away for a few months to focus on other priorities, but my brain kept coming back to it. During a particularly conference call-heavy week at work, I found myself scribbling out fun pose ideas on sticky notes:
And like… I really started liking the idea. What if I did do a whole army of these silly bean-headed folk? I’ve honestly never been that huge of a consumer of other people’s chibi art– it’s fine, but in and of itself it’s less interesting to me than traditional real-scale art– but I’ve always found it a pretty entertaining scale to draw and sculpt in myself. The huge heads and cartoony style give you a huge canvas to play around with expressive faces and dynamic poses, and the scrunched body proportions minimize the exact parts that tend to be boring and annoying without adding much interest– namely, legs. Also, one of the fundamental challenges of sculpting is usually fighting with clay’s desire to be soft and round, and laboriously working to force it into sharp and hard-edged shapes. With chibi, that initial roundness is actually exactly what you want, so you can skip most of the refinement. So in the end, working in chibi scale just ends up being “normal sculpting, minus the misery.”