Sculpting Prototypes

Written by Christopher on Sun, Jun 28, 2009

With the character illustrations locked down and a clear direction set, it was time to get our hands dirty. David Cox was tasked with the job of turning what he drew on paper into clay sculptures.

Before picking up his sculpting tools, David created a basic wire armature in the size and shape of the character he intended to sculpt. This served as a foundation for him to build the model on, which would act as a guide and give it strength. He secured the armature to the lid of a pill bottle using a hot glue gun, and further bonded the various joints of the armature for strength.

When the glue had dried (which doesn’t take very long with hot glue), David prepared the clay. His preferred choice is Roma Plasticine. Unlike common clays, the plasticine doesn’t dry out allowing you to come back and work on it at a later date. You don’t even need to cover it with damp cloth when you leave it for a period of time.

It comes in various levels of hardness of which David’s favourite was hard. I’d recommend beginners start with soft or medium as it can be tough on your fingers over time… David is hardcore.

Quick tip: If you’re working with Roma Plasticine in colder conditions, it starts out quite hard. Depending on the level of hardness you selected, you can either warm it up in your hands by kneading it, or pop it in the oven on some foil for 10 minutes on medium. Keep an eye on it though, you don’t want to burn it and stink out your kitchen.

For sculpting, David has a collection of standard sculpting tools you can pick up from an arts and crafts store, but he prefers to use his dental tools as they’re built using better materials, feel more comfortable in your hands, and have nice hooks on the end for carving.

After several days and multiple revisions, we settled on the basic body shapes seen below. We ended up using foam balls for heads to save clay.

Now that all the character body shapes had been modeled, it was time to move on to the next stage and create molds for each figure. If you have any questions about the process, feel free to leave them in the comments. If you’re interested in learning more about sculpting, head over to stopmotionanimation.com for some great tutorials.