Part 1 The Armature and Pose of a Classical Female Figure Sculpture in Monster Clay

Welcome back to the channel. Today in this video we are starting a standing sculpture and we are going to be working with oil-based clay. Normally I do most of the things in water-based clay because it's a lot easier to fire and of course it's cheaper. I've been meaning to try out some more oil-based clay and we're going to do a standing female figure study. We have our armature here. This is an armature that you can make fairly easily. This kind of adjusts up and down. Beauty of oil-based clay is you don't need a structure to kind of hold it up. We will need some sort of like base just because aesthetically it makes a whole lot more sense. And then we're going to pose our little armature. This is the clay that I will be using. It's monster clay medium. I'm looking at my pose here. There's a lot of things happening. So we have a classical contrapposto. That is the hips on the model are this way, shoulders this way. She has her arm up and then this arm is going to turn a little bit. This one you have a shoulder. This arm kind of goes up and this one goes behind her head like so. It's not that important right now to have the pose absolutely right but now I'm looking at her spine and this is where it gets interesting. So it takes some time to put all of these things together. Now this leg is taking a step forward like this. That's the hip that goes lower and then I'm going to position this. This is the weight bearing leg hence the reason the hips are this way. The side I am going to position this forward bend her back a bit. This leg is going to be a little bit straighter. So once we increase our hips it's going to be this way. So this angle is that way and we're just going to mask in the shape of it. So I'm going to start right here at the torso. Let's do one for the legs. You do not want to add too much because with clay we're going to be taking care of a lot of this and the last thing you want is sculpting and then having some clay some foil coming out too much and then having it to push in. I got this kind of masked in. I want to apply a coat of oil-based clay just the same coat but this clay even though it's a medium still very difficult to to do this. Now monster clay this clay is probably some of the best I have ever used for oil-based clay and it comes in this really handy tub. All you do take this to your microwave and put it on a couple of minutes. Usually like two minutes will be enough to soften this and you can burn yourself so be very careful and a couple of minutes this is much softer but you know softer is just by doing this it comes right out. So these little strands make it so much easier. Now I can start anywhere where I need to mask it so what I want to do is just kind of put a coat of this just everywhere and I'm essentially just going to mask it in. I really love this clay monster clay like I resisted monster clay for a while because I thought it was just all is just for 3d game development sort of stuff but it it turns out it's just so much nicer when you work with this sort of stuff it doesn't like leave a residue in your hands like the Chavant yeah and of course their harder compounds is much nicer and there is something nice about sculpting with something of this value like that that color that lightness you can see the values better as you're sculpting. So I'm just going to fast forward and I'm going to cover this entire piece with a very thin layer of this. So I want to get a nice thin coat of plasticine all over and once that's done it's easy enough to kind of move it around and manipulate the clay. Don't get carried away with adding too much clay on your armature. You want to keep it thin in the beginning. At this point I'm drawing a nice curve of the body. I want to make sure that I know the and the direction of the hips and now I'm just going to fill in with clay the arms. Try to keep your sculpture undersized as opposed to making it too thick. Now I'm going to take a measurement of the head and I'm going to count down on many heads and mark in the clay the actual head leg. One thing that's very important is the great trochanter of the femur. That's the part that really sticks out and on this model that part is very obvious. She's got very wide hips. Now I'm attaching a wire to the arm and then attaching it to the other arm. This should let me move things around very easily. So one of the things that you are going to be having to pay attention to is proportion. Generally a human body from the top of the head to the heel or the plinth where it sits on the base is about seven and a half heads and generally artists count the heads of a figure. It's very easy to do on a standing figure but it changes as soon as you have a reclining pose. On a reclining pose there is less engineering when it comes to building something up but at the same time it's much more difficult to take measurements horizontally because the body is doing various things and normally you are not like from the top down looking at the head. So usually these head counts work really well for standing figures. One of the things that I tend to do is from the top of the head to the pubic synthesis which is right about here. I'll take half and normally you can take that half measurement and then you just reverse it and there we go. That one is right where we need to be or you can take this a measurement from the head and put a mark over here put a mark over there and count down how many heads you have. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, they all have these proportions of artistic anatomy developed and they all use the head. So normally eight heads tall would make a very heroic figure because the head would be slightly undersized giving it a little bit more superhero-like quality and actually superheroes when you look at their proportions you're talking about nine heads so their heads are tiny in comparison to their body. But generally in a classical sculpture like this where we're trying to stay true to the human body it's going to be about seven and a half heads tall and it depends widely on the person. You do not want to measure to the top where there is hair you kind of want to go where the top of the cranium is and that's where I'm taking my measurement. But if you're too lazy for the head count just do top of the head to the pubic synthesis and then down and that should give you your measurement. We're coming to the end of the session and I have progressed much faster than I would with a water-based clay. Water-based clay requires quite a bit of engineering building up and with this sort of clay and making a 3D scan of it I can get this done fairly quickly. But of course it still requires a lot of work a lot of drawing and I am really enjoying this monster clay. It's one of the best clays you could possibly get. I've tried quite a bit including JMAG, Chavant, Roma and monster clay it's expensive but you do pay for that quality. I'm going to do a series on this figure as a classical figure that's standing. I do enjoy standing figures quite a bit but in water-based clay you have to have an addition to the standing that is a prop that holds up the sculpture itself. And with oil-based clay you don't need that but you still will need something if you do a 3D print or make a mold of it. Just something simple maybe attached to the leg will be more than enough. So as we come to the end of this I really appreciate you guys watching. If you like the content make sure you hit like and subscribe and I will see you in the next series. Thank you for watching.