How Sculpture Is Adding To My Learning

Hello my Moonlings, 

I wanted to update you on my sculpture progress and speak a bit about what working on this has taught me that I can apply to my 2D work.  This piece has mostly taken over my life recently and  I have been sculpting every minute that I possibly can.  Her deadline is looming so I am on overtime trying to get her finished and am absolutely enthralled with the process!   

This was her humble beginning.  I am working with Classic Clay in the “Hard” variant.  Having worked only with Sculpey previously, I actually found this buttery substance to be a welcome change and I am grateful my friend Laura talked me into purchasing the Hard variant as the Summer heat is making it intensely soft already. 

I began by laying chunks of clay over the entire armature creating a simplified skeleton as I wanted the realism of bones poking through where needed.  After that, I laid on sheets of muscle according to numerous references from books, and collected photos online saved to my ever growing Pinterest anatomy folders.  Laying out each sheet of muscle was really interesting.  It felt like doing a puzzle and is helping me greatly in my overall understanding of anatomy on a level that is different from what I have learned just doing 2D art.  I feel that sculpture will be a great benefit to me in memorizing and learning in depth many anatomical features from different angles that I had not previously thought of.

The Ochre Queen, dark unicorn of Mountaincholia, has an exaggerated anatomy based on a mix of equine and cervine features.  Her long limbs are a bit childlike and cartoonish.   She is meant to feel flexible, smoky and strange.  A mix of old and young.   That concept has suited my 2D work fine enough, but bringing her into 3D is a really unique challenge because I am realizing just how much thought I am having to put into her to give her a balance of believability and whimsy.  Her foundations are rooted in reality, her personality is suspended in nonsense.  

I have made plenty of mistakes throughout.  For instance, this hindquarter area had to be completely re-done as I realized I had captured a very relaxed feeling of muscles, lacking the contractions and distortion that such a pose would realistically give them.  Sometimes you can only find so many references, and have to play a guessing game.  Luckily I found an image of the hind quarters of a race horse that better helped me understand how the muscles would bunch in her legs under tension and I am redoing this area (which you will see in future updates)

Overall, this process has been a fascinating way to shape my own knowledge and get me thinking about things  I have not given myself the opportunity to think of in 2D art.  I feel like the fact I am doing this piece under loose mentorship, and knowing that it will be seen by two master sculptors, has been an excellent way to force me to truly push myself, take my time, and think of things with even more depth because it feels less familiar. Sometimes we can fall into patterns and habits with the art styles, subject matter, and  mediums familiar to us, which can be a good thing, but it can also come with getting in the pattern of certain short cuts that can potentially hold us back (at least for me I am sure!).  This has largely forced me to break way from a lot of that and reminded me to take similar approaches when working on painting.