HOW TO SCULPT WINGS in sculpture using clay and a simple removable armature for a bird eagle angel

Okay guys so today let's pick up where we left off with this wing. I've shown that for those of you that missed the last video this wing sits in there like so. I showed in the last video how to get this armature set up and going. But I'm gonna apply the clay today and it's not hot out so that's nice. So this clay is just the the right texture for me for doing this. And stick around a little bit in the video I'll show you the secret for moving quickly through this texturing process. Hopefully in this video you'll get a really good idea and maybe I can get most of this wing done before this video ends. And there's a secret that can expedite your efforts and I learned this from one of my mentors and he doesn't really know how much he taught me but I was really paying attention as much as I could. His name is Dan Chin. Very good sculptor, very excellent painter and he's a good man. Anyway I learned a lot from him and I'll show you one of the things that I learned from him so let's get going. So with this you know you can if the paper takes you can smear the clay on there if not you know apply it on your armature wire here first. The thing about wings when you're sculpting them is that they're going to be thin and I mean you want them to have a certain lightness to them so that they look good. And then you also want to make them so that they're thick enough that you can make a casting of it successfully. I normally don't do how to sculpt videos because for me the process of sculpting is a lot of give and take. You know you put clay on you take clay off and to me I kind of work out some of my ideas in clay and there's enough videos out there on how to sculpt. Maybe I'll speed up this portion here. So this video is going to be about how to sculpt wings and maybe I'll put a little picture up here where wherever it's going to appear somewhere over there of my reference material Byzantine art. I remember the Byzantine art from my art history classes and such a distinct style the lines so zigzaggy and whatnot but they had a lot of cool concepts as far as visually how to put things together. So all right I'm not going to bore you here. I'm going to speed this up and throw some notes on the screen. If you guys haven't liked or subscribed yet please do that and check out the description. I'll play some good music, what I consider good music. So here's what's up. I got the wing covered with clay. I'm going to have to reshape it to the shape that I want and this is very soft and I may have to cut that off because I don't want that touching it. Anyway so I noticed that the hole is opening up bigger with the weight also. I have a piece of brass tubing here. I think that this is uh you know it's obviously a little too large but once it's in there that should help. So I'm just going to shove this in there so that'll give me a spot every time to register and hopefully you know that will help stop it from digging into my sculpture. Now with that said also I can see I can get away with adding a little more clay to the wing and with these wings there's a a lot of bulk. If you ever look at an eagle's wing of course you're going to be using photo references mostly. These are much stronger right through here. What you know if you hunt duck or geese you'll know here also that this region is thicker if you examine the animal. There we go. I think I am going to cut this off. So over about 15 minutes of work that's not bad. This does have some thickness but it still doesn't look terribly heavy. I mean it feels a little heavy in the hand but when we mold this the spout is going to be here and we might run a uh tip it like this somewhat so that we're not I mean we could put a vent here but we have to make sure that when we pour it in it ends up you know that would never fill we have to you know the water table. Anyway this is all going to fill in pretty nicely I think and I'm going to work out a couple other details to kind of smooth this. So at this point we want to get this as smooth as possible and try to tighten things up to make it and when I say smooth I mean your primary form because these dips and hollows aren't doing you any favors at this point. So okay so now that I've pretty much got this level-ish the way that I want it I've used the rake tools to help kind of smooth that down on the front so let's just roll with that for a So this is the secret tool you get a birch baltic birch ply this is a half inch and it's just a scrap piece that's all it is. I suppose you could use any block of wood that has a grain that's exposed so this can leave nice check textures and even sides where you don't think that there's any real ridges. So this is not ply this is a solid piece of wood that I've cut into a block and this one has the natural grains of the wood. Okay so let me just try to explain this again. I took the time to build this up so that there is a overall form here you know it's not flat it's arching that way and then this is built up as the creature actual winged creatures do like ducks or hawks or whatever geese. So on this side after I did the area that I wanted to divide the wings up into I kind of made a pretend line I guess you could say where I wanted these to go. I'm using the of my knife to just kind of smooth that to make a suggestion as to the vein and the feather. But I started out with just this block of wood this is solid wood this is not ply and there is a natural kind of the rings of the wood will begin to show here. So I just took one side and I went down like this on the one side and I tried to keep my point the same going all the way down where I start and then drag off so I'm dragging and when it came to the other side of the feather I have a loop tool that I made and this loop tool I just wrapped a piece of wire around a wire I'm not going for the realism I'm going more for the effect. If it looks good and it homogenizes with the piece I'm going to be fairly satisfied and happy. So after you do those lines I recommend taking this solid block again and just gently knocking back those last lines that you do. I'm all about layers and if you can get more layers going on you know you you start to hide your technique if that's something that you're interested in doing. So you know when it comes to doing wings I feel like the more uniform you are the more the wings aren't going to look good. That's my personal aesthetic and you know nature always does it better. That's going to cast nicely I think that's got enough thickness to it maybe like an eighth of an inch up here or moving into like a quarter of an inch and this part up here closest to the body this is about three quarters of an inch so it starts to move into a half inch three eighths quarter inch eighth of an inch down here to about three sixteenths of an inch. So we've got the clay on the wings my reference material has a wing that's styled like this and I know this is not a naturalistic type wing. This stick is just so I know not to pass this line because it's going to go on the block I don't want the wings to cross into this space and I also am using this as a stop to keep the from moving any farther forward and I had to trim up the wing so I had it like a feather coming off here and maybe here anyway I had to trim it up because this dial hand there we go there we go so this it comes out here is going to stick out about an inch and I need to make sure that the minute hand clears that as it spins around so I just went ahead and clipped that wing off altered my design a little bit and some of these recessed areas you might like to know this I was taking clay I put just a little bit on there like I really like the folds here and I don't want to hide those so I but I did need to fill some area in there so I was putting the clay you know on there as such and that doesn't look half bad I'll leave that there and basically trying to get in there where my fingers could not so that looks pretty good weather's going to be getting warm a little later so I need to do this while it's still cool in my studio from the night air you can see here that I now have the clay applied to the wing and I wasn't really happy with the way that the texture was going on its own so I wanted to sculpt the form on there and it's a primary stages we have primary secondary and tertiary and we well anyway I have this set up I put brass tube in her back to hold this and I put this piece of clay here to keep the wing where I want it this is fine meaning where I want it because it has to block the or stay free of the arbor hole the sting up against it so what I did to create these spots or feathers here's a little example here so I would put down and working from inside out because we're layering if you're curious about this so I just put down a dot and then I smear it and then I smear where I'm going to put the next layer if you want to kind of push that down a little bit that's the general idea and this is where you have to really use your sculpting skills because you're going to find that there's a certain flow maybe you can see that maybe you can't there's a certain flow that you can't just you know if you put this on here and just you know take it this way you're going to have a different effect that line is going to show up differently so I was trying to create a sweeping up motion to juxtapose there's art school term for you against this direction so this one sweeps up this one sweeps down and that creates balance in the piece and then from the front it still looks like it's going up for the most part and then again this kind of leans over that way and these are just smaller dots so again start at the bottom and move them on up you know start with the bottom dot smear and then put the dot on top and smear and that's that so on these bottom feathers so on these bottom feathers I drew where I wanted them to go and again this is based on the Byzantine art style those drawings of angels or mosaics rather of angels so these feathers aren't completely stylized they're not realistic but we want to allude to the natural naturalist quality of them so this is solid block this is not ply and then the natural grain it's going to create something that's a little more favorable I think and you'll have to practice with it this is not something that comes a little naturally but with your style and your handling much the way that you write your name it's going to be unique to you and now up here it might be wise to not use a flat surface on something that has a curve I have a tool and this by itself is again rudimentary basic in its essence here but this gives you more of a round a round form it's much easier and tight and then when you have your such as it is lines you can go over it with the block and you kind of knock down those high points and it creates a different texture you can even gently press it with your finger and again it's a personal preference how far you want to get into it some people you know the realism is where it's at for them and they're going to try to match nature and you know if that's your tribe so be it I'm going for effect and be mindful that as you do this you're going to have to turn it over and eventually work on the back and maybe just come up a little on the inside to kind of meet it and the see since I'm suggesting feathers at this point if I stay on it too long what it's going to look like is messier and messier and you're going to lose that effect of impression and start to create more of a like you're going to look like someone who's attempting to create realism so anyway I'm only going to go so far with that and then I'm going to stop I think overall as a sculptor the impression of the 3d form itself is what matters the texture is so secondary but you know sometimes you you know it's about that texture on a 3d form but for me I'm not going to lose sleep over this I'm only going to go so far with it and be patient with yourself hope you guys enjoyed this if you like this please like and subscribe I appreciate it make sure you check out the description below to see if there's anything that you can use in your studio save you the trip I am an affiliate with Amazon and you'll be sent over to Amazon's website and whatever purchases you make they can have us into your front door okay all right so if you want to support my channel also you can make a contribution or donation at paypal.com slash me slash John Burns Fine Art we give 10% to charity sometimes a little more appreciate that please uh share the old fine art methods of sculpting the figure and these things are really a lost craft so it's up to people like us to share it to keep it alive thank you so much there's greatness inside you get out of your own way when I say that it's a term of endearment stick around for the next video in the next video I'm going to be talking about drapery and I'll show you how I approach doing folds here's a little sneak preview right there and I can do a little promotion for one of the books that I really really like and for those of you that watch my channel probably already know what I'm talking about but I'll show you some tricks for drapery and some of the basics there you're doing drapery and how to approach it okay guys signing out