Hand Sculpting 1000 Scales ( It was worth it )

Dragons. Dragons? Some say they're real. Others say nothing beats a jet-zoo holiday. But I think we can all agree that they're pretty cool. Which is why I want to sculpt a cat-sea serpent hybrid thing. And the first step to do that is to splat a globe of oil-based clay onto the table. So we can roll it out into a snake shape that also kind of resembles a long turd. Now we're going to give it a back massage to create a slightly pointed peak on the top where her backbone will be. After smoothing out the dents, I'm going to use this wire clay cutting tool to slice a thin strip from the bodem to create a flat spot. What we're trying to achieve is a roughly triangular-ish cross section like a real snake would have. After further refining the shape into a now spear-shaped snorden snake turd, I printed off a few different sizes of diamond scale patterns that I can now use to transfer onto its bode, progressively using the smaller ones as I get closer to the ends. And after going back over deepening the lines so they don't disappear as I work on it, I'm left with this super cool diamond pattern that progressively gets smaller in concert with the turd's narrowing girthitude. After scribing in some belly scales, we can now finally put in some bends and turns. Also, drawing on the scale pattern before adding the movement will make sculpting the scales infinitely easier later on. As you can see, I'm letting gravity do a lot of the work. Just going with the flow, adding movement wherever I think it looks good. That's what's so great about making art. You can literally do whatever the f**k you want. And what I want are wiggles going all directions to give it a dynamic look. Now that I'm happy with the basic shape, I'm going to draw a bath. Then get some ice and pour it into my tub that I pre-filled with water. Then poop in our little headless friend. You see, oil-based clay is hard or soft depending on what temperature it is. So by cooling it down, its current shape will not slump under its own weight. But there's another reason I pooed it in water. Since this is going to be a sea serpent, what better way to figure out where to cut the booty to make it look like it's actually swimming through water than to use actual water. After draining the tub to the level that I think looks good, I then mark the water line all the way around each portion. And then cut through each of those lines, removing everything below it. Now when you set each piece next to each other, it looks like it's swimming through the table. Oh my god, I can't believe this is happening! Moving to the face, I started by smooshing a blomp of goobus onto a homemade armature stand. And after roughly spherizing, I splat a separate smaller goobule onto the front, which will eventually become a separate smaller goobule. When sculpting something that requires symmetry, it's good to mirror your movements simultaneously on either side. This, in turn, will naturally cause both sides to look the same. For me, there's always this weird part that every sculpture goes through where I just keep adding and smushing clay around to try and get a shape that I like. And it always just looks a bit weird, but if I keep going, slowly the shapes start to make sense and come into focus. After scooping out the ocular cavities, and instead of sculpting the eyeballs from soft clay, a little trick is to make some hard spheres the size you want out of polymer clay. That way you can just poop them in and add in the eyelids without fear of denting them. It's also way easier to roll a ball with your hands instead of trying to sculpt hemispheres while inside the face. Moving to the ears, I sectioned off equal parts of clay so that each one will at least have the same volume. Then, being mostly out of frame, I flattened the pieces into a roughly triangular shape while pushing in the middle section, causing the outer edges to curl inward slightly. After deciding where they should be placed, I added a little worm around the base to blend the areas they intersect with the head to make a nice smooth transition. Poking in some external nasal apertures, not only so she can breathe, but so she can now turn them up at us. Look at that smug expression. Now that we have a good foundation, I want to add some feather-like doodads around her face. Since she's part reptile, I thought something that kind of looked like a cross between fur and scales would look good. And, since I didn't sculpt both sides at the same time, another trick to creating symmetry is to take a photo, then flip the image. Now you have a perfect reference when sculpting the other side. I just hit one year of complete and total abstinence from both alcohol and THC. I knew. And thanks in large part to today's sponsor, BetterHelp. As most of you already know, I have struggled with addiction, but I actually kind of now think of it more as self-medicating to sort of quiet my mind from the constant static brought on by things like ADHD, etc. But with that came a whole buttload of other problems like reducing my creativity, increasing my anxiety, self-loathing, and hangovers. Therapy has not only helped me learn how to cope with my issues, but also to some degree helped leverage them to my advantage. That's why I encourage all of you out there who are struggling to consider checking out BetterHelp. And even if you're not, I still recommend them, because a therapist will listen, ask questions, and can help you see things from a new perspective. They can give you advice and techniques to make positive changes in your life, no matter if you're going through something or not. All you gotta do is fill out a questionnaire and get matched in as little as a couple of days, and if they seem like the right fit, you can literally have a full-blown therapy session anywhere you want. No one goes through life unscathed. So please click the link in the description, or you can go to BetterHelp.com forward slash BobbyDukeArts and get 10% off your first month of therapy. Okay, um, as you can see, we've got him to this point, and I know all the little scaly, spiky doohickeys look a little Jarflington, Jallian-Pachango, but we're gonna fix that. And the way we're gonna fix that is with some lighter fluid. And basically what the lighter fluid is, is it's kind of a lubricant smoothing agent. I'm not even sure how it works. And then we're gonna use a... hold on. A pencil with a Dremel thingy attached to it. And we're gonna dip it in the lighter fluid, and then we're gonna, like, do his makeup. Basically what this will do is add a whole buttload of tiny little scratches, and it'll help even out the surface. But you don't want to go too crazy, because then your fingernails will disappear. And then we're gonna go back over with, like, a regular paintbrush and smooth out the deeper scratches until it looks like that. Wow. That looks great. Now that she's had her smoothing facial treatment, I'm gonna go ahead and give her a beard. Oh, do shut up. Lots of female animals have beards. And while we're at it, let's go ahead and add all the whiskers. I'm kind of going for that stylized Japanese dragon thick-whisker look. Dadgum, she's looking handsome. But she's currently without a booty. So let's remedy that. I don't like the way that looks. Not even a little bit. I think it looks super dumb. So, let's fix that. Oh yes, that is much better. Mmm. The next thing I want to do is to think about what I'm gonna do with these scales. And I don't want to just leave them like this. They do look okay. It's just, I think that they should be a little more three-dimensional. And I love the look of keeled scales. The kind with the sort of ridge running through the center. Usually on Pit Vipers. Blah. Blah. Blah. Things like that. So, I'm gonna try and recreate those all over here. I think it's a great idea. I also don't think it'll take that long. I mean, how hard could it be? To make the first scale, I went ahead and carved away some of the clay at the top of the diamond. In this area. Then, grasping one of my tiny balls, I rolled and pinched it into sort of a little leaf shape. Then after placing it at the bottom of the diamond, blend it in while creating a high point, or ridge, going down the center. Like that. Now I just have to do that like literally a thousand more times, and yes, I counted. Why is this taking so long? Oh my gosh! Look at this little dude! That is the smallest... Holy crap, that's a tiny worm. Aww, it's adorable! Oh, it's on my finger. Get out of here, worm. This is my video. Now, I decided to do this video I decided to do a little alteration to the tail shape, because I kind of forgot about gravity. And to further help it not tip over, let's add a little flipper to the end. Another cool sculpting trick is you lay down a thin piece of plastic, then using a pointy tool, scratch in the texture you want, so when you remove it, it's not super deep, and it looks more natural. Especially after smoothing with some of that lighter fluid. Now that all that's done, ooh, that looks nice. We need to figure out what to do in this area. I need some way to transition and blend all of that area together, so I might add almost like a mohawk. I don't know. Then I might even add some kind of... A door switch! ...of some kind. I don't know. Let's see what happens. And what happens is I start extending the scale pattern up onto the head, morphing it into kind of a cool mandala design to make her look a little bit more mystical. Then I just start carving out above and around them to make them sort of pop out a bit more. Add some of that texture and stuff to the ears to make them juicy and delicious. Like an idiot, off camera, I decided to put on some spikes as sort of a test, but ended up liking them and didn't want to do it again. So sorry about that. Anyways, I promise you will see how I make the smaller versions of them in just one second. After making sure they are properly adhered, I went ahead and added sort of a membrane in between each one to make it look more aquatic. Wow! Moving on to... A dorsal fin! First, I start by adding spikes on top of each ridge scale. And the way I made those spikes is by taking a small glob of clay, rolling it into a cone, and then smoosh in a pointed tool, creating a debot. Continuing to shape and taper them so that there's a ridge on the opposite side of where I smooshed. Then you just cut it to the length required, and you place it on the next scale. Now it's time to make the membranes. Those are made by just smooshing a piece of clay flat and thin, holding it up, and tracing the space in between the spikes, cutting it out, and pooping it into place. It's that simple. Now you just repeat all the way down. Then, blend and fill the gaps. Texture! Texture. Okay, after a lugubrious amount of time, the sculpture has finally been completed, and I'm going to show it to you. But first, I need to have it 3D scanned. Why? Well, you'll find out in a second. And in order to 3D scan these, we're gonna need these guys. And these guys is Noah from Dynamic 3D. Hello, Noah. Actually really interested to see this thing. So this is a super highfalutin 3D scanner. Whoa. That's cool. It looks like some kind of futuristic weapon. Alright, let's get this all set up. Okay, so before I tell you why I'm getting this 3D scanned, I just want to give a huge thank you to Noah and Dynamic 3D for being so awesome. I mean, they literally came to my house, so I didn't have to risk damaging the sculpture by transporting it. Also, I want to have Noah tell you a little how this process works. So I'm using the HandyScan Black Elite from Creaform, which is a little bit different from other 3D scanners in the sense that it doesn't use photogrammetry in the traditional sense, but instead it's projecting an array of 22 blue laser lines onto the surface of the sculpture. And it's using two cameras to track how those lines warp to map the shape in 3D. As I turn the sculpture on the turntable, it's using those stickers and targets that you see, those are called retroreflective markers, to track its position in space. And it's capturing over a million data points per second within an accuracy of 25 microns, or about the width of a skin cell. What does that mean? I'm just kidding. Lasers are magic and nobody knows how they work. Dude, thank you so much for coming out. Seriously, what a cool service. Alright, see you later. Okay, now on to why I had all the 3D scanning done. Well, I originally had this long script written out of how I was going to talk to you guys about this, but I decided not to do that and I'm just going to talk to you. The reality is, I had that done because I want to relaunch, sort of restructure my Patreon because I could use your help. And because he's a good friend of mine and just because he asked to do this for me, I'm going to briefly turn it over to my good friend, Mr. Everyday, who not only interviewed a sitting president, but also shot a baseball at Mach 1.4. My name's Destin, I have a YouTube channel called Smarter Every Day. I was a fan of Bobby Duke Arts long before I ever met Bobby, and I just love what he does. Me and my family, we will gather up on the couch and we will watch the new Bobby Duke videos as they come out because it brings us joy. And I have been a patron of Bobby's for almost five years now. It brings me joy knowing that I participate somehow in Bobby making Bobby Duke Arts. I love it. And so, I want to explain something. Let's say that there is an amount of money that you need to make life happen. Well, I know a thing about Bobby. I know that he is sending daughters to college now, okay? And the way it works is, when you're a YouTuber, the way money happens is sometimes, if you do a good video, it'll go up like that, but then it goes back down, and then sometimes it won't go up, and you don't really know how to predict life. And you're getting things like this. You don't know if it's going to be feast or famine at any point in time. You just don't know. And that's very discouraging if you're trying to make things. And so, what ends up happening is you try to make videos that the algorithm will love. So you kind of get into a situation where the tail wags the dog. Well, I don't like to do that because I want to make the things I'm genuinely interested in, and I know Bobby is the same way. I really think it would be awesome if we collectively could come together and we could support Bobby on Patreon. That way, his baseline level of income would rise up above that threshold that he needs. Then that's going to mean more Bobby Duke videos for all of us, hopefully. And the best way to do that is by supporting Bobby on Patreon. Daggum, Destin. You definitely know how to make someone with an artist body blush. That's what it comes down to, is I would love to be able to create videos that are not designed to get tons and tons of views. So back to the reason why I had the 3D scanning done was basically I'm having Joel, the 3D printing nerd... Hi, Dukies! ...print off the dragon you see in the video. And to incentivize you guys to go over and check out my Patreon, I will be giving away different types of dragons depending on the tier you sign up for. It's basically a thank you. You know, it's not like you're buying it or whatever. It's to incentivize, yes, but also I feel like I just really want to give you guys something that take the time and give the financial gift to help me do what I do. So if you feel as though I've earned it, then I would be so grateful if you'd consider signing up to patreon.com forward slash bobbydukearts. And on that note, without further ado... It's finished.