Deanna's Demo: Animal Sculpture

I'm Deanna, I'm going to be teaching your Animal Sculpture 1 course. And we're going to be learning traditional methods as well as modern day methods for sculpting. So this is how we would start a sculpture. You just use basic wire, this is aluminum wire. And I begin by making my own. This is probably the trickiest part. The trickiest part is just getting the wire to stay together. I'm going to coil it up. And that creates the torso. This can be made into any kind of animal at this point. We have the torso. Alright, so at this point now we decide what position we want the horse in. Do we want him running? Do we want him standing? So I think I want him now to attach it to the base. Adding clay. We typically want key points of contact. That means we just thread the wire through the wood. And that's how we would start. So once we have our sculpture, we start by adding clay around the torso. So we're going to start in the area of the body that is thickest. And just do that by adding it in thin layers. At the beginning you want to pack your clay in as tight as possible. You want to squeeze out all of those air bubbles. A little note about using the Super Sculpey, this pink clay. The more you move it, it creates air in the middle. So you want to make sure you pinch it tightly. Add small bits of clay as you go. When you add large pieces of clay, you end up creating a lot of movement. It just creates air around the wire. So I would do this in layers until I got to the point where it was built up to here. This is called bulking out. We would bulk out the muscles and the shapes of the body of whatever animal we are creating. So you can use metal tools, wooden tools, dental tools. You can make your own tools. Wire and tools. All of these will give you different textures. And the ability to make different lines, creating muscle. When I'm detailing, I tend to go for the wooden tools in this kind of clay. The reason being is it doesn't stick quite as much as the metal tools. So I'm going to start and work my way up. And the reason I'm going to do that is because of the nature of the clay. If you're using a different kind of clay, you might approach it differently. And the reason being is this clay moves very easily. So I want to move it up so I don't just start the way. So like I mentioned, I'm going to be moving up. The same idea with the tool. I'm going to have an upward motion as I roll the tool. In this class, we're also going to go over anatomy and animal behavior. And we'll talk about that throughout the course. So that you can apply it to your sculpture. So right now I'm working on what's called the bulb of a horse's hoof. And that area is very... there's two points that are round. Which create a little bit of a triangle. Connects to what's called the coronary band. Which is the area right above the hard part of the horse's foot. The foot lock is from the coronary band. To right about in here. And this is a tendon. That is visible on the actual horse. So in here, I am just adding what are visible tendons to the hind. And I'm doing that just by creating what we call peaks and valleys in the sculpture. The peak would be this center piece. And then the valley would be what I'm... As you use the tool, you want to try not to create a hard line. You want to create soft, rounded lines. Which is why I choose to use the wooden tools in this clip. And we'll work that way all the way through the sculpture. And as you've seen, it's the same method when we're doing hair.