Shopping before chopping...

I’ve been told & recognize that it is taking a bit of a risk here in sharing more & in showing so much detail … considering how early on this sculpture is – in that it needs so much more still… & that so much is very likely to be changed!

I thought though it would be fun to share what I’ve recently pretty much decided -- like many of my works I’m going to want to lengthen the abdomen … in this case I’m going to do so after I’ve cast the prototype resin as I did with Kipling (click to see that). :)



I like to personally use photoshop to invert the colors too - any way you can make the whole work look different helps you spot areas that leap out as "odd"...



Many sculptors have shared the mirror trick with you too that's in my first photos of this post, but I thought it would be fun to show that age-old tradition in photoshop as well. Overall, this little 5min exercise in photoshop confirmed that somehow I've taken a properly proportioned armature & managed to do a very common error for me, exaggerate an area again. There are 2 reasons not to make the drastic change to the belly right away though. (1) The armature will fight me, it's going to try to yank the extremities back if I pull, this is hard for me to explain but trust me, it's not a great idea... and (2) when I'm done refining I may find that I don't need to lengthen it quite so much, I might shorten the legs or neck, or all of the above.. so I really do like to leave that towards the end.

I may not share too many more in progress photos of him, I try to restrain myself as I’m learning it tends to put off people if they spot a flaw (like a neck too long or a back that’s too short)… it’s only that over the course of months when I do get to work on my own sales pieces like this I get so excited to share! To the topic of the title though, perhaps my sharing will help other sculptors though see that the use of photoshop before tackling some of the more extensive operations can help determine all sorts of things. With Kipling for example I photoshopped the neck shortening to find the spot I most wanted to make the cuts at, and the extent of the shortening I’d wanted to do. In the end I decided it wouldn’t be so hard to do in clay and it really wasn’t at all, armature & all! Hope this helps someone in other words! :)