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X-men's polaris

  • Thread starter swords
  • Start date
I did something to my back last weekend so I had time off work and needed to keep my fingers busy so I put together my first comic statue (definately because I'm hyped from the toy studio where it's all about comic statues).
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This is X-mens' Polaris, an heir to their arch enemy Magneto. I have a ways to go with cleaning everything up and adding her mask. This is green toy wax, so after I finish her, back the melting pot!
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Hi Josh
She is very good and my she,s all women isnt she  
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I havent seen you posting many photos of your plants lately?whats up?
Bye for now Julian
 
I've often thought most comic heroes' biggest super power was fitting into their skin tight costumes!
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I think her amazing superpower is going to be keeping her boobs up to her chin like that as she ages.

Excellent work as always! I'm envious, as always! Oh, to have such skill!
 
She's leaning back and bending her neck forward so a bit of the 'lift" is illusion...
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She'll be on a pedestal base with some kind of "magnetic look" (whenever I figure out what that would be!. Maybe the molecule rings with protons traveling on them?

By melt down I mean she's made of toywax so she's not permanent in this state, eventually she'll become brittle and begin cracking apart. If I want to have a permanent (and paintable) copy I will need to part her up and make a silicone mold and make some urethane castings. Essentially making a model kit with a limited edition of one! Basically I'm just trying to learn how to use this wax that all the sculpture studios are using. Clay is for fossils I guess! The wax is actually faster/easier to work with than clay but it's hard to get used to working next to an oil lamp, heating tools & burning your fingers. I got some great 3rd degree burns last night pouring liquid wax into my palm (accidentally)! I should have her finished this week sometime and decide if I should make a mold of it or just take a bunch of pics.
 
Shame you didn't snag one of those bismuth crystals up for auction, that would make an interesting base. Another nice one... you're going to have to surprise us sometime and post something that looks really bad! ;)
~Joe
 
Josh..I was having a bit of fun!  Someday...make a sculpt of a super-hero gone to seed, LOL! You know, paunchy, wrinkly, boobs down to there.....

Did you go to art school?  Or are you one of those people who is born with their talent? I am not saying people who have an innate talent for something don't still have to work at it.  I have friends who are just naturally talented at painting or sculpting.  They went to art school after high school, too, though I tried to convince them they didn't need it.

I am still convinced to this day that artists see things better than most people...the ability to realistically transfer what you see to another medium is not a skill attained without a great deal of struggle.  Some people have that ability from the get-go.  

I work with clay and make mug sets that have leaf impressions in them. People seem to like them, I give them away or give them to charities to be auctioned off.  I also make little clay cats while I'm sitting and watching tv, it's good physical therapy for my left hand. I really do need to take an anatomy class someday, to help with the musculature bit. I do wheel-throwing and hand building, and I like hand building the best because really the only limit is your imagination.  And if I don't like the results..I just squish 'em!  

April
 
  • #10
No, I never took any serious art schooling because my subject matter was always junk according to the teachers. I was always doing creatures, dinosaurs, warriors, ghosts and other fantasy things they wouldn't show in the student gallery. I've never thought of it as art and never thought about any schooling, just messing with stuff until I figure it out. Nowadays there is a school for toy design but it doesn't teach toy sculpting, only basically the "business" end of toys and toy marketing. There's still no action figure/collectible statue sculpting school.

If you're already doing clay cats and crafts that's a great start! Do you use Polymer Clay (super sculpey)? That's a standard for action figure sculpting (now being replaced by wax by most studios) and the art doll scene. It can be obtained at just about any craft store. Make sure it's the Super Sculpey product sold by 1 lb block in the green box (it's all pink). Mix it with a color cube of Sculpey Premo which will make it easy to see the details in your clay and make the baked super sculpey project less brittle.

It will help you to get some good anatomy books which show you the surface (or superficial) muscles. This book is tops in my anatomy stack, you can read the description/order at amazon WAY cheaper than the hardback version from the bookstore!
Visualizing Muscles by John Cody

I have a ton of anatomy and reference books on specific subjects like wrinkles in fabrics, hands, heads, wax, animal anatomy, etc. There's a great number of them which I've picked up just at Barnes and Noble and Borders. Books on drawing work as well for sculpting. Christopher Hart's series on drawing Extreme Anatomy /Cutting Edge Comics is a very good for doing heroic men and women in comic style.

Like everything it just takes practice along with using your reference books while you're sculpting. With polymer clay the project won't go bad if it isn't finished in one day (I've had sculpey projects on my shelf since last summer and they're still sculptable) so all you need to do is go back the next day and work it some more. You'd be surprised how your work progresses if you can plug away day after day until you feel the project is "done". Take a digital photo at the end of each day's sculpting then when you are "done" and have baked your figure go back and look at each days photo and you'll see the forms becoming clearer and sharper. Taking breaks before finsihing any project is a plus because your eye will be able to see imperfections when you go back the next day that your eyes will have learned to "ignore" while looking at your sculpt the day before. Also having a mirror at your sculpting area is helpful to look at your figure in reverse. This will let you see crossed eyes, lopsided cheeks, one arm shorter, etc.
 
  • #11
I went to art school, and you probably know 90% of what you would have been taught there. I guess the only thing missing might be historical context (I don't know how your art history is)... but sometimes that really just works against it, like it did for me.
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I'm guessing you also have a photographic memory, which helps a lot. If not I'm even more impressed.
 
  • #12
Our teachers took us to art museums and showed us videos and books and things about the history and different styles of art. But I dislike "fine art" sculpture and paintings. I never understood why people liked that classical stuff or considered the makers of it "masters". Maybe doing it first get's them the title of master? Some of the romantic period's paintings and statues were decent but usually rather stale subjects (kings, queens, angels) in lifeless poses/portraits. I prefer to see art that replicates life (or a fleshed fantasy) as closely and vividly as possible, including action and emotion.

As a kid I always enjoyed going to the annual wildlife art show with my mother (who drew pencil portraits) but they don't hold them here anymore. I know the nature stuff isn't acceped by the "art world" any more than skateboard designs or fantasy statues. To me it's weird considering 90% of the work on a fantasy or wildlife painting/statue is taking it from the finished "fine art" stage (rough figure) to an replicated actual person or animal. To me that's where the art comes in... The devil in the details! My teachers always said I wasted too much time on detailing when I should be starting new projects. I figure doing one good drawing in an hour long class was better than seven pointless ones. My Polaris would get a C or D and the kid next to me would have a shapeless stick figure with a golf ball for a head in the same pose and get an A. I never could get what they were telling me with that sort of grading.
 
  • #13
I saw a sculpture in London somewhere... I forget the artist/period/whatever, but it was a woman carved out of stone. I was standing literally two feet away from it and could look at it from every angle... and I swear my brain thought at any moment she could open her eyes. I knew it was stone, but I saw very pale skin. The hair even looked like it could move if there was a draft. Usually you would think if it was just in a picture taken from far away, that's when it would be most deceptive... but I could have only gotten closer by touching it. There has to be some mastery in there somewhere.
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And some of these guys were the original action figures...
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(I had a different one like this in mind that was more dynamic, another serpent battle, but now I can't find it)
 
  • #14
Don't get me wrong, I'm not slamming everything. Some of the old statues and books are very nice Rodin & Michelangelos statues are very nice. I've got a compilation of 1500 pages of DaVincis anatomy studies. But the stuff they showed us of art history in school was mainly the paintings which were early abstract and the modern "junk pile" sculpture. I was just trying to say what pushed me away from art class.

My teacher would have likely put a C on that piece there...
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  • #15
Yeah, most modern (technically post-modern I guess) art reeks of people desperately looking for new ideas. Plus I've noticed it's usually hard to appreciate without an explanation attached. Once you hear the explanations you come upon something brilliant every once in a while, but I usually don't "get it" on my own.

And some of it is downright intellectually/morally bankrupt if you ask me.
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If I were to take an old ragged couch off someone's front curb, and put it in a show with a long statement about America's habit of constantly running away from decay and sweeping the old under the carpet in order to make room for the new and our wastefulness and gluttony and yada yada yada, and then someone buys it for $5000... well, I'd say the real art there is how much money I've made suckering someone into thinking I'm brilliant.

Anyway, you'd probably like the Baroque stuff, if you don't already.
 
  • #16
We're on the same wavelength!
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  • #17
Sculpture waxes are color-coded based on their properties. Pink wax is the softest I know of; you can soften it with the heat from your hands, so its great for melting and pouring, and gets used a lot both for assembly line casting work and for more organic effects. Blue wax is hard, and is also called "carving wax" and is what most jewelry is made out of. Yellow wax, or "sticky wax" is mostly used for spruing. Green wax I'm only peripherally aware of, but I seem to recall that it is even more hard and brittle than blue.

Anyway, if you're in to sculpting in wax, the obvious next step would seem to me to be lost wax casting. Its a bit facilities-intensive, but generally places with equipment will rent their space out to people who do things like lost-wax casting, glass blowing, fabrication, etc.

Another possibility is doing a rubber mold and casting it in plastic. Smooth-On produces a fine variety of easy-to-use products for casting and mold-making.

Finally, I don't know much about the toy industry, but the miniatures industry builds their models first out of 2-part epoxy putty, which is available at most hardware stores.
 
  • #18
[b said:
Quote[/b] (endparenthesis @ June 01 2005,8:34)]Yeah, most modern (technically post-modern I guess) art reeks of people desperately looking for new ideas.
Thank God! Someone else has noticed! I went to an arts high school, and I am so sick of contemporary art, it makes me want to claw my eyes out. I made some very talented friends there and watched the bulk of them grasp desperately at a concept that would make their art new and hip, without ever taking time to actually practice and get any better... One particularly unpleasant kid actually somehow got away with painting a reproduction of some pornography - I won't go into details, I honestly wish I didn't remember the details. Which is not to say that there's something wrong with porn, I just felt it was just a poorly thought out attempt at garnering shock value, and a poorly done painting to begin with. And a rather disturbing look into that kid's personal life.
But weirdos aside, there were a lot of other really good kids there that would spend so much time looking for new ideas that they just didn't get squat done. It was really frustrating to go to school with all of these people who were leaps and bounds more talented than me, and watch them sit around and whine about how they couldn't think of anything cool to draw.
~Joe
 
  • #19
Hey roach, sounds like you must do some sculpting/garage kit making yourself?  I've used the smooth on products for a year or two now (2 days delivery even with cheapest shipping rate for me). Although I like GI-1000 for making the silicone molds when pouring resins.

The wax above is called Castilene it comes in pink or green and in soft, medium and hard varieties. I'm using the hard green up there. It's sticky yet holds good details but will soften with the heat of your hand if you hold it too long (and I'm a holder). It's becoming the standard prototype wax/clay media for toy companies like Sota, Neca, McFarlane, etc. Other companies use an even harder wax (which won't sofetn in your hand but is not sculptable by hand) It's "barbie pink" colored and called Azbro (many companies make their own wax recipe but it has the same qualities of Azbro). Very fine microcrystaline wax, talc free and melting easily to a liquid and cooling as soon as heat is removed, sandable to a glassy polish. With Azbro (and similar mixes) you can use a wax pen with a capilary tip almost like a dip-pen to "draw" shapes on your sculpture but the strokes are in 3D! Much faster than castilene. If you surf over to: The Complete Sculptor
And click online catalog and then waxes you can read the descriptions of Azbro and Castilene in the specialty waxes section. They also sell the old fashioned stuff like Beeswax, carnanuba, brown sculpting wax, red casting wax, sprue waxes, etc.

I've sculpted an "average" male figure in 1/6th scale and will be trying my hand at making an alglinate mold (kinda like making a mold out of stiff jello) of the parts for streamlining future working in Azbro. Instead of making a junk mold every time I wanna start a project. I've sculpted an average build 12" fig in fx clay (took 2 hours compared to 2 days in hard castilene). From this I'll make an alglinate mold, cast melted azbro into the aglinate, pull the casting and clean up the anatomical details and make a cut open silicone mold for part replication in azbro wax for future use. Then each fig just needs to be cast in wax, posed and "fused" together eliminating the first day or two of work on each figure and reducing it to half hour or so!
 
  • #20
[b said:
Quote[/b] (swords @ June 02 2005,1:09)]Hey roach, sounds like you must do some sculpting/garage kit making yourself?
Not really. I'm a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and I'm really more of a painter, but I've done some bronze and silver sculpture, as well as "mixed media" work.
 
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