Where to begin?

Creating the armature. I knew that I needed to create a 12 inch figure, so to do this I needed to create an armature to hold up my sculpting material.

 

Ideally you would start off by measuring the person and working out proportions etc. This was not an option as sadly, Rupert was killed in Afghanistan in 2009, so the first thing I did was find  a proportion guide on the Internet, I typed in 'male proportions' into an image search and found this guide  on  www.idrawdigital.com  and I believe that it is from Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth by Andrew Loomis. Using Photoshop, I scaled up the image to 12 inches and this formed the basis of my armature.

 

I didn't have any thick armature wire when I started this project but I did have thin wire. Using my trusty drill and a vice I twisted the wire to make a thicker gauge that would suit.

 

 

 

 

 

Using the printed proportion guide and my new wire, I cut and bent lengths to shape and the easiest way to do this was to lay the wire directly onto the paper, forming the limbs, spine, and chest etc.

 

The armature would not stand on it's own and with the additional weight of the modelling material it would just collapse. To overcome this, it is standard practise to use a brace, in this case I used aluminium armature wire that was too thick for the body but perfect for the support.

The brace is screwed to the board and the feet have extra wire which is fed through pre-drilled holes holding the whole structure securely.

Then to start adding the plastercine. I started by blocking out the main shapes and trying to establish the pose. The pose was pre-determined as I was working from a specific photo.

 

Below: This image is the basis of my sculpture. The quaility of the photo is poor but the print out I was using was clear.